whether earned on a football field, a tennis court or while moving an old radiator. They are, he says, “just ordinary active adults who are living life or getting hurt on the job. “Whether I’m operating on a college football player with a damaged knee, a high-level amateur tennis player with a torn rotator cuff, or a mason who earns his livelihood lifting heavy weights, it’s the same,” Dr. Smart says. Dr. Smart would learn that Parlato earned his bachelor’s degree from SUNY Oswego in industrial arts education, but when he graduated, there were few, if any new jobs in his field. With neither he nor his wife wanting to relocate from Upstate New York, Parlato fell back to an earlier talent—horseshoeing—to earn his living for nearly 20 years in Onondaga, Madison, Oneida, Cayuga and Tompkins counties. He missed teaching all along, he says, and would give presentations on various aspects of equine husbandry to pony clubs and 4-H groups. He earned a part-time job as a teacher’s assistant for BOCES, before becoming a fulltime faculty member three years ago. As Parlato likes to say, he spends his days teaching industrial equipment operation to 45 young men “who are just dying to push dirt around and burn diesel fuel.” While teaching is his full-time profession, he still shoes a few horses and harvests firewood from his property—neither of them easy tasks. As a result of his active lifestyle, the 6-foot-1-inch Parlato maintains broad shoulders and, as Dr. Smart describes, “massive forearms and biceps,” at least until he tried to move a 700-pound radiator. When Parlato held his arms out with his palms up for Dr. Smart, the difference was obvious with the biceps on his left arm sagging to one side like a loosely filled sausage casing. Dr. Smart told Parlato that some men his age or older with an inactive lifestyle might choose not to have surgery, but that with Parlato’s active lifestyle he’d definitely recommend it. Following Dr. Smart’s advice, Parlato scheduled his first surgery ever. It was then that the sports medicine doctor learned about another facet of Parlato’s active life—the highland bagpipes. He’s been playing the highland pipes for about 10 years and plays regularly with the Syracuse Scottish Pipe Band. He even plays in the BOCES parking lot occasionally during lunch—to the amusement of most. “I told Dr. Smart the day we scheduled the surgery that I didn’t want to put any more pressure on him than he already had as a surgeon, but I wanted him to understand that not being able to play the pipes was one of my biggest fears. “The horseshoeing I’m doing I am getting a little old for, so I’m going to have to give that up anyway. I don’t necessarily need my physical nature to teach. It’s more intellect and using my educational skills. But, if there were one thing I would miss it would be the piping.
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The pipes are a passion I picked up later in life. Playing serves as a catharsis for me.” So dedicated is Parlato to piping that he postponed his original surgery date, so he could play the pipes at a friend’s funeral. “I could still play, but it was uncomfortable, and whatever was wrong wasn’t getting right again just by laying off and letting it try to heal,” Parlato says. In fact, postponing his original visit to his primary care physician and “letting it heal” had made things worse in that the damaged tendon was forming scar tissue in places where it wasn’t wanted. Dr. Smart, with Parlato’s fears in mind, performed the surgery at St. Joseph’s Northeast Surgery Center in Fayetteville over 90 minutes. It sounds easy enough when Dr. Smart describes it: “You find the tendon still attached to the lower biceps and then put stitches in it. Meanwhile, a hole is drilled through the upper end of the radius bone and the tendon is passed through the hole to the back of the bone and attached to what we call ‘a button.’ The bone then grows around the button and the tendon is secured.”
“Whether I’m operating on a college football player with a damaged knee, a high-level amateur tennis player with a torn rotator cuff, or a mason who earns his livelihood lifting heavy weights, it’s the same.” —Ryan Smart, MD
The surgery started on a Friday at 11 a.m. and Parlato was in the postanesthesia care unit by 1 p.m. He was soon asking when he could go home and even when he could go back to work: “It’s just a little cut. I’ve been kicked worse than that by a horse!” Although he was expected to be away from BOCES for two weeks, he was back in the classroom on Monday, three days later—his arm in both a sling and a brace. It was swollen at the end of the day, but with several days of icing “the swelling began to subside and it didn’t look like my arm weighed 800 pounds anymore.” It was eight weeks, just before Christmas, that Parlato first tried playing the pipes. He used small “parlor pipes” to begin with, but soon graduated to the “great pipes” around which so much Scottish lore is woven. And how was it? “I couldn’t turn my wrist very well, but I just had to try it. The fingers still move and it’s happening,” says Parlato. “It’ll come, and I’ll be back on the street playing in no time.” l
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St. Joseph’s hospital Health Center
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caring Connection