Helping amputees and phantom limb pain

ME AND MY MIRROR

Treating phantom limb pain with free mirrors and mirror therapy ...globally.

Posts by Stevo

It’s a tough crowd

By on Feb 21, 2014 in Outreach

If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itOne more down. He said, basically, ‘It’s nice to be cured, but I gotta go back to work.’ It’s a tough...

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It’s Not About The Mirrors
Stephen

It’s Not About The Mirrors

By on Jan 22, 2014 in Outreach

If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itThis is Peng. He’s an AK or trans-femoral amp. About halfway down his bone, same as me. He lives in a town called, in Lao, “10 Kilometers” ‘cuz it’s about 10 kms out of Luang Prabang on the road out to Kuang Xi (a lot of stuff has a Chinese ring to it up here). Peng and Onu makin’ a difference! He’s a strange case; he got terribly burned in his lower body due to a propane tank explosion. He ran into his flaming hut over and over to save his family. Fully 15 years later, having been more or less functional for years, he developed a bone infection in his right leg and consequently lost it. The stump looks real good, it was a good procedure; practice makes perfect and the surgeons here get plenty of opportunity to hone their craft. After the surgery, though, he was offered a pair of shitty crutches for 10 bucks USd and told sayonara. He doesn’t have a fake leg and there is no reason why he shouldn’t; he has plenty of stump. I’m not sure what happened and I bet he isn’t either. I went out with a mirror feeling certain that, all things considered, he must be in a world of phantom pain. In a word, he’s not. Some peeps just get lucky. In a way, phantom pain is like life itself. Anyhow, I was perversely disappointed that he wasn’t in agony and equally perplexed as to why he wasn’t up and running, so to speak. His operation was in 2006. The wife gets pissed off cuz he’s not much help in the garden. He used to make his money as an organist and musical composer but found that after his trauma his creative talent dried up. This is super-common and not very well understood. Now he just kinda skootches around his hut on his ass, cuz he doesn’t even like his crutches. He couldn’t believe that I was on a bicycle. 10KM Town is fairly isolated.   I was brought to him by my new Lao friend Onu who is both a first class chap and a number 1...

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