EDDYSTONE — Samantha Quinn rolled back and forth on the giant blue exercise ball in the offices of Prosthetic Innovations Tuesday morning.
The Mount Holly, N.J., girl was in the process of getting fitted for her second custom-made prosthetic leg and she knew exactly what she wanted.
“I just want the color pink,” she said definitively.
Quinn was born with a leg that had no nerve or muscle development so she underwent amputation surgery. She’s worn a prosthesis since she was 20 months old.
Her mom, Dana, said her daughter doesn’t slow down and having the perfect fit helps keep her going. “She goes to gymnastics and swimming,” she said. “She does all that.”
Being different is something the prosthetic-making business strives to do.
On the walls are pictures of Prosthetic Innovations clients playing golf, running marathons, downhill skiing and swimming with dolphins.
There’s even a letter from a Pennsylvania state trooper who lost a leg after an accident while serving in a presidential motorcade earlier this decade. After obtaining his prosthesis, he’s passed all the required police physicals.
“He’s back being a state trooper again,” Michael Rayer, PI certified prosthetist, said, adding, “Pretty much everything you can imagine, an amputee has done. We have to customize devices to stay with them.”
Formerly an industrial automation engineer, Rayer started the business with his brother, Timothy. Timothy Rayer had been a physical therapy aide at Bryn Mawr Rehabilitation and was fascinated with prosthetics.
The two were living together at the time and Timothy would bring prostheses home and Michael would be intrigued by the technology of it. Eventually, they joined forces, returned to school and honed their skill for years before opening the business in 2006.
“Every fit and alignment is custom-made,” Michael Rayer said. “Instead of, ‘Oh, it’s something I have to put on,’ it’s something more. It’s more personality.”
Customers, who range in age from 6 months to 95 years old, can choose their colors or their design, including American flags, eagles, reflective flames or butterflies – limited only by the confines of their imagination.
A pre-World War II wooden crutch with a leather-covered cotton pad hanging on Prosthetic Innovations’ laboratory wall serves as a reminder of the options once available to amputees.
Now, these clinicians evaluate how the prosthesis will be used from regular toddler activity to skydiving to golf to determine where the weight-bearing centers will be.
Then, a casting is made of the residual limb and it’s shaped down. A heat and mold plastic model is made and perfected.
“We spend a lot of time in this phase to make sure that we get it right,” Michael Rayer said.
Generally, he said two to three test sockets are created, although they’ve done up to nine. Then a permanent carbon prosthesis is made.
John O’Brien of West Chester used to travel to San Diego for his devices until he learned of Prosthetic Innovations two years ago.
“Those guys,” he said, “they gave me my life back. They’re good at what they do.”
O’Brien enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps right out of high school in 1983 and learned to fly jets. Ten years later, he was flying the single-engine, single- pilot Harrier during his third landing training of the day on a narrow road in Cherry Point, N.C.
“I bounced the aircraft and I hit a bunch of trees,” O’Brien said. He received third-degree burns over 36 percent of his body that required 12 different skin grafting surgeries to repair.
He also lost his left leg below the knee and an arm.
“I try to live my life as normal as possible,” said the regional director of regulatory affairs for Flight Safety International. “I don’t focus on my disability. I just focus on my abilities.”
With that mindset, he said Prosthetic Innovations has helped him. “I just wanted to exercise again,” O’Brien said. “Those guys built me all the tools to do that.”
He has a workout arm, a swimming leg and a running leg – and an arm built to simulate The Terminator’s.
O’Brien said it was symbolic. “I don’t care what other people think,” he said. “I’m getting my life back. It’s truly cool-looking.”
In the meantime, being in the Keystone Innovation Zone allows for more possibilities.
“With the opportunities that they provide, it really opens up the potential to grow more safely,” Rayer said.
He added that Prosthetic Innovation hadn’t yet taken advantage of the tax credits available but would consider it to cover the salary cost of an additional employee. “It’s a great thing for companies like us who are looking to do more,” he said.
And it further frees them to focus on delivering their hopes to their clients.
Dana Quinn is grateful for the service that allows her daughter, Samantha, to charge at life the way all girls her age should.
“We just love it,” the mom said. “It’s like being in someone’s family room.”
How the customers change thanks to the custom-made prostheses is all Michael Rayer could want.
“It’s awesome,” he said. “It’s awesome. It makes it fun to come to work. You see such great things.”
From fitting an Iron Man athlete to helping seniors chase their grandchildren again, Rayer said he wants Prosthetic Innovations to eradicate the limits seemingly placed on any of his clients.
“Losing a limb shouldn’t be an end,” he said, “it should be a new beginning.”