Beating the odds
When 80-year-old Henrietta Dunay stands, her legs click. But she grins and bears the pain, knowing that as a double amputee, most people her age, in her circumstances, wouldn’t be standing at all.
“She’s my star pupil,” said Dana Kolencik, her Albert Gallatin Home Care and Hospice physical therapist, beaming.
Dunay quietly smiles, bowing her head down a bit, and takes that opportunity to show off why Kolencik has come to that conclusion.
With prosthetics attached from the knee down on both legs, Dunay uses her walker to get out of her wheelchair and take a trip to the kitchen.
She travels from her carpeted living room, over a small rug and into the linoleum-tiled kitchen.
There, it’s exercise time. Leaning on the counter by the sink, Dunay stands on one leg, lifting the other out to the side.
Those exercises help strengthen her hips. She repeats on the other side and then goes on to other moves designed to increase her mobility with her new legs.
Her daughter Regina walks away to get a tissue, tears streaming down her face.
Regina Dunay said she has made countless trips from her Orlando home to Fayette County over the past couple years.
The trips started in 2002, when Dunay’s father, and then her mother, took ill.
With both of her parents at Mount Macrina, Dunay said she often spent time wheeling her mother, ill from diabetes-related complications, to the hospice wing to see her dying father.
In March 2002, her father died. And several months later, in November, Henrietta Dunay had her right leg amputated.
The amputation resulted from poor circulation. An adult-onset diabetic, Dunay had heart problems that stemmed from the disease. Those problems required bypass surgery in 2001, and doctors grafted veins from her legs.
To replace those veins and hopefully increase circulation, doctors grafted veins from her arms, but by then, said Dunay, it was too late.
When she lost her right leg, Dunay’s doctor ordered a prosthetic. When she lost the left leg in January 2003, her daughter said the doctor didn’t bother.
“He figured, with her age, she wouldn’t walk again,” said Regina Dunay.
But her mother, whom she affectionately referred to as a “tough old bird,” had other ideas.
“From the beginning, I made up my mind that I was going to walk,” said Henrietta Dunay, who likened her prosthetics to walking on stilts.
She started at Mount Macrina, where she walked with her right prosthetic leg, and put her left leg on a stool to move along.
When it became apparent that Dunay would walk again, her daughter called the doctor and told him of her mother’s progress.
He ordered the second prosthetic.
In May, when Dunay started working with Kolencik two times a week, the two set goals. First, was just for Dunay to stand with her prosthetics. Since that time, Kolencik said she’s had to re-write the goals at least three times as Dunay’s surpassed each of the benchmarks she set.
Kolencik said she was uncertain that Dunay would ever walk on her new legs.
“When we first put them on, she could hardly stand,” said Kolencik.
The ensuing process wasn’t easy. When Dunay first started walking, people followed her with a wheel chair in case she needed to stop. And there were adjustments around the home as well, including wheelchair accessibility and small ramps throughout the house that make taking small steps easier.
Then there were was the pain. Dunay struggled with phantom limb pain, a phenomenon that affects people who have had body parts amputated. Despite not having legs, Dunay complained of constant pain in her ankles.
At one point, Kathy, another woman who does home care for Dunay, sat rubbing her prosthetics in an attempt to make the phantom limb pain subside.
To combat the pain, which occurs less now, Dunay said she uses a rolled up newspaper to hit just below her knees where her legs now stop.
That, said Kolencik, is an effort to help train Dunay’s brain to recognize her legs stop at a different place now.
“It took a long time for her brain to realize that her legs weren’t there,” said Kolencik.
“But I’m getting used to it,” said Dunay, who now wears her prosthetics for eight or 10 hours a day. “Now, they’re like getting dressed.”
She’s also getting used to the pain that a bone in her left leg causes. Because the bone has not yet become calloused enough, Dunay said she feels pain when her left prosthetic is on because the bone juts out into her new leg.
The prosthetics are held on to Dunay’s legs with layers of white cotton socks and shrinkers, rubber looking socks, that provide a buffer between Dunay’s legs and the prosthetics.
Depending on how swollen her legs are Dunay adjusts how many layers she uses.
When Regina Dunay saw her mother in May, she said her mother couldn’t get out of a chair unassisted. Two months later was a different story, said Regina Dunay, choking back tears.
“When I saw her in July, she just popped right up out of her chair,” said Dunay.
The progress, said Kolencik, is largely due to her disciplined and exercise-compliant patient. Along with the leg lifts, Dunay uses dumbbells and a large band to help bolster her upper body strength.
Her daughter said on one recent night, her mother started exercising around 11 p.m. because she knew she had to get it in.
Now, Dunay stands unassisted, and the wheelchair others used to push behind her is stationary as she uses her walker to traverse her home. She can also use a cane to walk for short periods of time.
Despite her determination to walk again, Dunay credits much of her success to Kolencik, whom she sees two times a week.
“Dana’s the one that got me going,” she said.
Kolencik quietly smiled.
“You won’t get too many like her,” she said.
In the coming months, patient and therapist will be apart while Dunay spends the winter with her daughter in Florida.
To prepare for the trip, she and Kolencik have made a bit of an obstacle course out of the house. Instead of picking up rugs or taking the easy routes throughout her home, Dunay has been tested to make certain she will withstand strange surroundings with ease.
And she looks forward to coming back in April, when she will start working with Kolencik again.
After all, said Dunay proudly, “I’m her star pupil.”
Patti Altman, the director of administration at Albert Gallatin Home Care and Hospice, said the business has been running for nearly 25 years.
It serves residents in Fayette, Greene, Washington, Westmoreland, Butler and parts of Allegheny counties, said Altman.
Albert Gallatin provides all Medicare-certified homecare and hospice services, including physical therapy, skilled nursing and home health aide services.