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| Julie Suttles. |
Julie Suttles understands what the kids who come to the Adventure Amputee Camp, Bryson City, North Carolina, are going through. The camp counselors also understand because they, too, have been campers. For five days in July, 30 campers with limb loss or limb difference, ranging in age from 7 to 17, go whitewater rafting, swimming, and if they feel up to the challenge, swinging off a 40-foot platform in the ropes course. For a small slice of time, the campers get to feel less different from other children, and they learn to shrug off stares—just like Suttles does. Over the years, the campers gain confidence and are more willing to challenge themselves.
"We don't push," says Suttles, who serves as vice president of the camp's board of directors—and is the camp's cook. "We just let the kids do what they are comfortable with. Our motto is 'challenge by choice.' Then one year, the reluctant camper just flies off that 40-foot platform."
Suttles understands what it means to make daring leaps. She learned to ride a motorcycle before she rode a bicycle. For years, she ran competitively and was part of a tight runners' community in Atlanta, Georgia. Focused, cool-headed, and physically adept, she was sure that she was not going to die when, in 2002, at age 40, she and her husband Jimmy were hit by a truck as they rode together on their motorcycle.
"The truck caught my leg in the wheel well," she says. "My training is in nursing, so I knew how to check myself and what to tell our friends [who were] riding with us. I knew my leg was gone. The next person who stopped was a paramedic who had tourniquets in his car. I was conscious the entire time."
As a result of the accident, both Julie and Jimmy Suttles lost their right legs above the knee. "We match," she says.
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| Campers at the Adventure Amputee Camp challenge themselves on the ropes course. Photographs courtesy of Julie Suttles. |
But the loss of her leg was only one item on a list of injuries which, in the first months after the accident, hindered the kind of recovery that this athlete was looking for.
"I had a crushed pelvis, eight breaks in one arm, broken clavicles, radial-nerve bruising to my right hand, and no grip," Suttles says. "By the time I left the rehab center in September, only my left arm worked well."
At the end of November 2002, she was fitted with her first leg and a basic, four-bar safety knee. Her insurance carrier determined she would not be a "viable walker," predicting that her level of ambulation would be too limited to call for a knee that permitted more activity. However, by that time she had learned about the Otto Bock C-Leg™ and was determined to have one for the greater mobility and more natural gait it offered.
"I had never heard of it, but one day I had a peer visit, and I asked [my peer visitor] if she could choose any leg, which would she choose? She didn't hesitate: a C-Leg," Suttles says. "I suppose that if I had been patient, in time I would have gotten the leg through normal channels. But I wasn't. I had interviewed two prosthetists who said, 'You can't do that,' when I said I wanted a suction socket C-Leg. Then I found Jim Hughes, CP, who said he would try."
Hughes, owner of Atlanta Prosthetics and Orthotics, Georgia, had been the first in the southeast to fit a C-Leg and understood the benefits of the hybrid technology. Yet despite Suttles' clear determination to resume a physically active life, he wondered if what she wanted was possible.
"Her number-one problem was a bad hip joint on her sound side," he says. "She couldn't bend forward to put on her prosthesis. Also, she lacked the strength to pull herself into the socket."
Then there was the small matter of insurance coverage. Although it has been marketed in the United States since 1999, most insurers still view the C-Leg as "investigational and experimental." And yet, as Hughes noted, for some very active patients, no other leg will do.
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| Campers at the Adventure Amputee Camp challenge themselves on the climbing course. |
"We don't want to waste time on another knee if the C-Leg is what all the signs point to," Hughes says. "But sometimes we have to take the insurance company to court to get it covered."
Instead of asking a judge for relief, Suttles turned to the Atlanta running community for help.
"They were phenomenal," Suttles says. "I said, 'This is what I want'; they put on 'Julie's Jog' and raised $50,000 in one day. I had gotten my first basic prosthetic leg two weeks prior to the jog, so I thought I should be out there, too. I walked a mile on my leg with the help of a walker. It took me 45 minutes to walk that mile, but I did it."
As it turned out, raising the money for a C-Leg was the easy part. Suttles still had a bad hip and faced a bedrock tenet of hip-replacement surgery: younger people don't get one. Hip replacements typically fail in 12 to 15 years, and "revision surgery" is more complex and technically more difficult than first-time surgery. Suttles was 41 years old.
"I really don't know how Julie talked her doctors into giving her a hip replacement, but she did," Hughes says. "Even after the surgery, she had a bad hand and poor range of motion. So we had to create this pole with a hook on it so she could reach down and pull the sock out as it pulled the socket into place."
After her hip-replacement surgery, it took Suttles eight months to begin walking well. She wasted no time and quickly took on a new challenge—this time in the company of the Amputees Across America riders, who make a yearly coast-to-coast charity trip, bicycling and skydiving across the country. With her three-wheeled recumbent bike, Suttles met her fellow riders in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and peddled for 850 miles to St. Louis, Missouri.
"I was the first AK woman to ride with them," Suttles says. "The ride shows people along the way that just because you lose a leg, you haven't lost your life." (Editor's note: This year's Amputees Across America starts on May 27; see www.amputeesacrossamerica.com for a complete schedule.)
In the first months after her accident, Suttles focused on her recovery and on regaining parts of the active life she enjoyed. But her need to push herself beyond what others told her would be possible inevitably made her a model for other amputees—adults and children alike.
"Julie is just a very outgoing person," Hughes says. "She is ready to help everyone. She spends a couple of days a week visiting people as a peer visitor for several of the rehab centers and hospitals in the Atlanta area. And she does the children's camp."
Suttles' support for the Adventure Amputee Camp came about when she was looking for a place to put the money from the second Julie's Jog.
"I searched for and found the Adventure Amputee Camp for kids…," she says. "I had the money, but I also had time and service to give. So I said, 'I'm coming to camp, too!'"
That was in 2005. In 2006, the camp's board asked her to join the board of directors as vice president.
"In 2008, I also assumed the very important position of cook," she says. "I cook breakfast and lunch for 50, with the help of some very good friends."
Suttles added that the Adventure Amputee Camp, a 501(c)3 organization, does not cost campers a single dime. But like other nonprofits, it has found that funds are especially tight this year.
"We don't want to have to cut back a day because we really need more days, not fewer," she says. "A lot of our children never see another amputee during the year. Here, a camper is not the slowest, or the one who can't run, or the one who looks different. We are all missing something. It is great." (Editor's note: For more information about the Adventure Amputee Camp, visit www.adventureamputeecamp.org)
Just as Suttles was a presence in the Atlanta running community, she and her upbeat spirit have made themselves known in the amputee community. In addition to her involvement with the Amputee Adventure Camp, she participates in an all-sports camp for adult amputees and para- and quadriplegics. She also facilitates the support group at Emory Hospital, Atlanta, for the Amputee Foundation of Greater Atlanta, and serves as a patient model for the master of science in prosthetics and orthotic (MPSO) program at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Atlanta, so that students can learn how to make legs.
In all her activities, Suttles still wears the same leg that Hughes fitted her with in 2003 and faces the insurance reality of "one leg per lifetime."
"My leg goes in the same category as a potty seat or a wheelchair," she says. "When I couldn't get other amputees to be active with me early on, Jim reminded me that if you break your leg, you don't get a new leg. I think the biggest shock to every amputee is that insurance doesn't really cover prosthetics."
From the time she began her recovery in 2002, Suttles has declined to let either shocks or setbacks interfere with taking the best of herself into her new reality. She consistently gives others she meets a little jolt of that same energy that Hughes noticed on their first meeting—the energy that prompted him to say, "Okay, let's try."
Jane Albritton is president of Tiger Enterprises, Writing Consultants. She is a contributing writer for the Northern Colorado Business Report and Edibles Front Range. She is also an editor for a 50th Anniversary collection of Peace Corps stories. She can be reached at www.peacecorpsat50.org
