Rehab Tech: From Wooden Legs to Robotics

Dr. Mark Tornero is the Medical Director of Vascular Rehabilitation at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio, and is board certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation. He is highly involved with Resident educational training and quality improvement and at the medical center holds a number of additional administrative roles and responsibilities. His work includes vascular rehabilitation and he serves on multiple national committees advancing care. He has lectured nationally and internationally and is involved with the development of multiple continuing medical education (CME) activities, developing national conferences, and is an exam writer of national and international examinations.

The 2016 holiday season took an unexpected turn for a Michigan family when Kevin Breen, father of three, became ill the day after Christmas. Kevin came home early from work because he knew something wasn’t right. What started as a severe sore throat had turned into mysterious abdominal pain. The pain and illness continued to get worse, so Kevin’s wife Julie rushed him to the emergency room. At the hospital, his condition continued to deteriorate. Doctors explained that the strep infection had traveled to his abdomen, which led to sepsis and septic shock. Over the next two months, this rare complication led to amputations of both legs below-the-knee, his left hand, and parts of the fingers on his right hand.

Katherine M. Reitz, MD, MSc, has completed her general surgery residency and is a vascular surgery fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). During her surgical training, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship funded by The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through which she worked to bridge the research interests of UPMC's critical care medicine and surgery departments. In this setting, she focused on the risk of limb threat as well as amputation and, more recently, focused on the importance of timely source control for community sepsis. The collaborative research team plans to continue this important work, as such outcomes are of vital importance to patients.

Inger Brueckner, PT received her BS in Physiology from the University of California at Davis and her Masters in Physical Therapy from Boston University. She has worked primarily with patients who have limb loss for the last 10 years of her 20 plus year career. She has co-authored an article on pre-prosthetic training for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America and is currently one of the primary investigators in a randomized clinical trial for transtibial amputations. Inger has been invited to speak at several local, national, and international medical conferences for patients, therapists, physicians and case workers concerning amputee rehabilitation. She is excited to share her experiences working with a multidisciplinary team to achieve the highest level of outcomes.