Moving and Motivating

Moving and Motivating

Moving and Motivating
Charlie Steele proves amputation doesn’t have to slow you down
by Elizabeth Lunt
Charlie Steele knew he was on the edge—he just never thought he’d
go over. As a workaholic executive with IBM he worked long days and, fueled
by cheeseburgers, fries, Pepsi and cigarettes, longer nights. After a diabetes
diagnosis, his idea of self-management was to stop buying cigarettes by the
carton. Sometimes he skipped the second Pepsi.
But that was 21 years and half a leg ago. Charlie, who is now 61, has had diabetes
since he was 40. At first his health problems were attributed to the blockage
of a major artery. He figured medical management would take care of it. His
doctor told him to stop smoking, lose weight and exercise. He ignored the advice,
but he began losing weight anyway, and he was also desperately thirsty. That
was the diabetes announcing itself. Even after his official diagnosis, Charlie
kept ignoring his doctors’ advice. A few years later he needed a quintuple
bypass. “I smoked my last two cigarettes in the parking lot of the hospital,”
Charlie recalls.
Not
long after the bypass, Charlie woke up in the middle of the night with a blue,
cold and painful left foot. He was admitted to the hospital, but the vascular
surgeon who opened the leg closed it right up and announced that he had done
everything he could possibly do. “If you don’t like what your doctor
tells you,” Charlie says with a laugh, “get another doctor.”
So he did. The second specialist tried creams and a hyperbaric chamber (a treatment
to increase oxygen flow to tissues) to improve blood flow to the leg. Charlie
thought for a while that the foot was a lighter shade of blue, but the leg wasn’t
really improving. It turned out that Charlie had a rare allergy to Heparin,
a blood thinner used during surgery to improve blood flow. The reaction caused
his blood to clot and irreparably shut down circulation in his leg.
After three months in the hospital, Charlie had lost 100 pounds. He was pumped
up with antibiotics, but gangrene was spreading into his body and the nurses
could barely find an open vein for the intravenous lines he needed. “It
was a terrible period,” Charlie says. He was in so much pain that he sprained
his thumb pushing the button on the morphine pump.

The first time the doctors mentioned amputation, Charlie was shocked and horrified.
But after three months of painful and fruitless efforts to save his leg, he
was actually ready. “Fine, take it. I’m tired of it,” he remembers
growling at the doctor. And then one day he was missing half a leg. Charlie
said it was like a “typical movie scene”: one leg is down to the
end of the bed and the other’s truncated outline is seen under the blanket.
He had grieved the loss beforehand—“anticipatory grief, they call
it,” Charlie says—but he was nervous about how he would cope.
The answer came quickly, in the form of a young amputee. Charlie was lying
in his hospital bed, about to be fitted for a prosthetic leg, when the prosthetist
told him that his assistant, Moe, who was bustling around the room getting everything
ready, was an amputee. Charlie couldn’t believe it. “He showed me
his prosthesis and my spirits were lifted 100 percent,” Charlie recalls.
But the immediate future was tough: Once he got the prosthesis he found he was
not like Moe yet—he had months of rehab ahead of him. He had to learn
to walk, to go up and down steps and to fall. (“It’s very important
to learn how to fall,” Charlie says.) In time, however, he was able to
step back into his three-piece suits. He went back to IBM and “life went
on,” he says.
Eight years later, after continuing to ignore his diabetes, Charlie needed
another bypass. The grafts had not held in his diabetes-damaged veins. This
time he paid attention. He began to read about diabetes, learning about diet
and nutrition. “I became a partner with my physician in my own care,”
says Charlie, who began cutting out articles and turned into a knowledgeable
patient. Before it erupts, diabetes is silent and painless but is “usually
stirring up like a volcano,” Charlie says. He wants to spread the word
that people should not wait until their diabetes erupts.
Charlie’s mission now, as a motivational speaker and board member of
the Amputee Coalition of America (ACA), is to talk to people with diabetes and
encourage them to manage it. He tells them 225 people a day lose their legs
to diabetes; 55 a day lose their sight; 120 a day suffer from end-stage kidney
disease; and 580 a day die. He gets right in their faces, he says, and asks
them: “Is this what you want—is this the risk you are willing to
take?” He tells them 70 percent of the serious consequences of diabetes
can be avoided with better compliance.
He also works hard promoting the ACA peer-visitor program—because he
will never forget his relief at meeting Moe. People need support from others
who have experienced the same thing, Charlie says, and he wants hospitals to
provide the programs. After morphine, a visit from an amputee peer visitor is
ranked as the most valuable intervention by returning war veterans with amputations.
“If you can reduce anxiety and stress about losing the limb,” you
can avoid other problems in the future, Charlie emphasizes.
Charlie also says that a good attitude allowed for his successful transition
to active amputee. “I had to realize I wasn’t going to dunk the
basketball,” he allows, but he realized after seeing Moe that he could
be active again, and that he could motivate others. “After they teach
you how to fall, they teach you to get back up again,” Charlie says. And
he wants to help others do the
same.
For more information about the Amputee Coalition of America please see Resource
Roundup.

About
the Author
Elizabeth Lunt, MS, has worked in publishing and libraries for many years. She
is the editor of Voice of the Diabetic and would like to hear your

comments about this article or any other in the magazine. Please send Letters
to the Editor to: Elizabeth Lunt, Editor, Voice of the Diabetic 1800
Johnson Street, Baltimore, MD 21230 or [email protected].