Amputees sometimes discover that there aren’t many resources for them once they leave the hospital. Wiggle Your Toes is changing that.
Most mornings, Chris Dunn’s 2-year-old daughter likes to help her father. She gets his shoes and his socks. Then she helps him put on his left foot.
“She gets really excited,” said Dunn, 40, who in December became one of Minnesota’s estimated 25,000 amputees when he voluntarily had his leg cut off below the knee.
Dunn, who first hurt his leg in a motorcycle accident in 1992, had endured 18 years of pain and more than a dozen surgeries. He finally decided to give up his leg after watching Internet videos of members of Wiggle Your Toes, a relatively new Minnesota nonprofit that is helping hundreds of amputees adjust to their new lives.
“I realized these people have a better quality of life than I do,” said Dunn, who saw videos of Wiggle Your Toes members skiing, running, camping and kayaking after losing a limb.
“After 18 years and a dozen plus surgeries, the pain was so severe that I couldn’t mow the lawn, I couldn’t play with the kids,” said Dunn of Eden Prairie. “I decided not to try and salvage something that wasn’t working.”
Wiggle Your Toes was started three years ago by Aaron Holm, one of the most famous amputees in Minnesota.
He lost both legs in January 2007 when he was hit by a car while changing a tire for a pregnant friend on Interstate 394.
“Things changed in an instant,” said Holm, who quickly discovered a harsh lesson while laid up in the hospital for months: “There weren’t a lot of resources for someone who has suffered limb loss.”
Holm found help in Rob Rieckenburg, who in 2005 had survived having his own leg severed by a train after he was mugged and left on train tracks in downtown Minneapolis.
“I went from having been a college football player and active outdoorsman to a world I knew nothing about,” said Rieckenberg. “I found out quickly that losing a limb brings a lot of challenges.”
Among the biggest, he quickly discovered, was not knowing how to adjust his life once he got out of the hospital.
He didn’t know what he would need. He didn’t know how to remodel his home. He didn’t know where he should go to get an artificial limb.
“No one told me anything,” he said. In fact, he said, most people seemed to be so amazed by his survival that a steady stream of people passed through his hospital room.
“I felt like I was in the zoo,” he said recently. “No one could figure out why I was alive.”
A common cause
Holm said he didn’t set out with the idea of starting such an advocacy organization. But when Rieckenberg helped him, he realized how much other people who lose limbs could learn from fellow amputees.
Wiggle Your Toes has more than 200 members, although not all amputees, said Holm, who runs the organization out of his home in Shakopee.
The Amputee Coalition of America estimates that there are 2 million amputees nationally. The group also says that more than 500 people lose a limb each day, mainly due to accidents or medical conditions such as diabetes.
Holm and other Wiggle Your Toes members are working at the Legislature with state Rep. John Kriesel — himself a double-amputee after a war injury in Iraq — on passage of the so-called parity bill, which would mandate that insurance firms pay more of the costs of limb replacements for clients.
The group also helped the Amputee Coalition in getting Gov. Mark Dayton to declare April as Limb Loss Awareness Month in Minnesota.
Reclaiming life
Rieckenberg, who was found by the train tracks about two hours after he was attacked while walking to a friend’s house after work, gradually returned to doing most of the things he had done before his “accident,” as he calls it.
“I like to say that I am doing everything I was before the accident, except slower,” said Rieckenberg, who was downhill skiing about six months after he lost his leg.
Having learned to live with his loss, Rieckenberg was happy to help when he heard about Holm’s injuries. He visited him in the hospital, sharing his experiences and telling him where he could get new legs.
The two became friends and Rieckenberg joined the board of Wiggle Your Toes in 2008 when Holm started the group.
Among the first people the group helped was Rick Kemna, who in 2008 lost both legs above his knees after a viral infection. After three months in intensive care, Kemna was reunited with his wife, Jill, and 6-year-old triplets.
“When I was first introduced to Aaron and Amanda Holm … I felt as if I couldn’t go on,” Jill Kemna said in a testimonial on the group’s website. “I just couldn’t see how our future would ever be bright again. Wiggle Your Toes changed our lives. They gave me hope.”
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