ALUMNI PROFILE
Pritzker News
Saving limbs and lives Pritzker couple marry careers as an army orthopaedic surgeon and an emergency medicine physician
BY RUTH E. KOTT
A
Washington, DC, area. But Potter chose orthopaedic surgery. (It clearly wasn’t a deal breaker; they are now married with three children.) As director of musculoskeletal oncology at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, Potter treats patients with bone and soft tissue sarcomas and
FOCUS HAPPY PHOTOGRAPHY
s students at the Pritzker School of Medicine, Michelle DiVito and Benjamin Kyle Potter, both MD ’01, agreed that neither of them would pursue a surgical specialty. “We shook on it,” DiVito said. DiVito kept the promise. She now practices emergency medicine in the
Michelle DiVito and Benjamin Kyle Potter, both MD ’01, with their children Flora, 4, James, 7, and Hazel, 9
32
cares for active military and veterans injured in combat. “Walter Reed is one of the major combat casualty care centers in the continental U.S.,” Potter said. After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, the hospital admitted three of
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION
the 17 amputees, and Potter consulted on two of the other cases. Whether caring for patients with severe limb injuries from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or salvaging a patient’s leg after removing a bone tumor, Potter aims to preserve as much limb function as possible. His specialty requires advanced reconstruction techniques and creativity. For some patients, he harvests bone from other parts of the body to reconstruct the resected bone and save the limb. In other cases, he performs rotationplasty — removing a portion of the leg and rotating the patient’s foot and ankle to act as the knee joint — which preserves some leg function and allows for a better-fitting prosthesis. Potter also conducts research focused on improving quality of life and limb function for individuals who have suffered blast injuries. Potter’s training in treating combat wounds was critical when he deployed to Afghanistan for six months in 2011. He served as chief orthopaedic surgeon at Camp Dwyer, then a Marine Corps base in southern Afghanistan. It was a different perspective “seeing people fresh off the battlefield, versus caring for them one to seven days later.” He also treated Afghan women and children who were hurt or who were born with congenital abnormalities. “It wasn’t the type of orthopaedics that I would necessarily do in my