Transformations
Exceeding the Benchmarks New York prosthetist shares the extraordinary experience of treating a determined patient with quadrilateral limb loss
Erik Schaffer, CP
In each issue of O&P Almanac, the Transformations column features the success story of an O&P clinician who has worked with an inspiring or challenging patient. This month, we speak with Erik Schaffer, CP, who teamed up with a patient with quadruple amputations to complete a fast-paced rehabilitation and conquer ambitious goals.
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Ilysa Winick, with her sons, was fit by Erik Schaffer, CP, with four prostheses after a near-fatal blood infection led to quadruple limb loss.
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O&P Almanac September 2023
rik Schaffer, CP, sees patients from all over the world at A Step Ahead Prosthetics in Hicksville, New York, but his most inspiring patient is Ilysa Winick. She “overcomes adversity at the highest level every single day,” says Schaffer, who has been her prosthetist since she lost all of her limbs in 2016. Contemplating his entire patient base, “nothing makes me prouder than watching” Winick get stronger each day, he says. For the past seven years, Schaffer has spent countless hours and a great deal of energy keeping up with Winick’s aspirations, ensuring he fits her with components that allow her to do more before breakfast than most people do the entire day, he says. Despite wearing four prosthetic devices selected and fit by Schaffer, Winick “has absolutely zero limitations, other than the ones the technology sets for her.”
Grateful and Resolute Winick, who is a mother of two boys, ages 13 and 11, lives in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City and is founder and owner of a prep school in the city. In June 2016, she unexpectedly contracted a near-fatal blood infection that led doctors to induce a monthlong coma. To save her life, surgeons amputated her arms at the transradial level and her legs below the knee. The infection also caused end-stage renal failure, for which Winick eventually required a kidney transplant. Given a survival rate of less than 10%, Winick recovered from her infection grateful to be alive—and ready to be fit with prostheses as quickly as possible. It’s not uncommon for some patients to become dispirited postamputation and to lose hope for the future—even after losing just one limb. But that was not the case for Winick. “Nothing was going to keep PHOTO CREDITS: A STEP AHEAD PROSTHETICS/ILYSA WINICK