Device gives Formula Atlantic driver hope after leg amputation, chronic pain brought him down
June 25, 2007
Then again, it’s a long way to the June Sprints from daily doses of morphine and thoughts of suicide.
Meet Michael Roman.
He’s a tattooed and bleached-blond 41-year-old who hops from place to place on his left leg - his only leg - when he’s not seated in his wheelchair or his race car.
He is at the same time proud and repentant, humbled and thankful, inspired and inspiring. He positively glows.
Roman races for himself, yes, but mostly for the people who reside where he has lived, trapped in the cracks of medical science, hopeless, helpless, addicted and bitter.
“I tell the kids all the time, if you dream big, big things happen,” Roman said. “It takes courage to dream but, also, if they come true there’s no better feeling.
“As long as you’re moving toward a goal, you’re successful.”
Roman’s goal is threefold.
For his family, he’d like to make up for 10 years of being a miserable husband, father, son and brother and to pay them back for their inspiration and support.
For himself, he’d like to climb from Formula Atlantic-class club racing to the Indy Pro Series to the Indy 500 by 2009. He has more hope - about racing and about life - than he has had in a dozen years.
And for others like him who have ridden the downward spiral from injury to chronic pain to depression, he’d like to use racing to raise awareness of possible solutions and of sources for help, and he’d like to offer hope.
“If I can get 34 people - two at 17 races - to be a little bit better off than they were when I got there,” Roman said, “deal done.”
The native of Buffalo Grove, Ill., blew out his knee playing basketball, and the resulting surgery left Roman with a staph infection.
Although familiar with the operating room from his job as a surgical assistant at a St. Louis hospital, he could not have imagined 40 visits as a patient. Doctors first amputated Roman’s diseased leg in July 1995, and then “revised” the amputation numerous times all the way to his hip.
Although Roman still felt pain, he was able to race go-karts, as he had as a kid, and to dabble in stock cars before a torn muscle in 2000 increased his dependence on painkillers.
Bottoming out
“It seemed like we had one failure after the other, and hope was a hard thing to come by,” Roman said. “When the doctor said, ‘Go home, medicate yourself and accept your life,’ that took the bottom out.
“I’m a million dollars in debt, I’ve had 40 operations over a decade and (second wife Suzy) has never known me to be healthy, to be consistent, non-medicated or sane.”
Suzy did her best to maintain her husband’s spirits and humor. She also held his morphine at night to keep Roman from doing “something stupid.”
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A couple hundred milligrams of the powerful drug dictated when Roman would wake up, and the pain would determine his mood.
“At first I told my mom, ‘I don’t ever want to see him again,’ ” said Roman’s 14-year-old son, Anthony, who spent Wednesdays and every other weekend at his father’s house.
“Sure, I called him ‘Dad’ but what did he do? He sat and yelled at me because of all of his medication. At the time I knew something was going on.”
On Roman’s umpteenth trip to seek a bump in his medication, his family doctor sent him to a pain management specialist, who suggested an implanted spinal-cord stimulation device.
Even with his medical background, Roman was frightened. He had averaged an operation every three months, and none of them had freed Roman and his family from their hell.
Finally Roman consented and went weeping into surgery in December of 2005. Two weeks later, Roman could cut back his medication, and now he is pain- and morphine-free.
“People get mad when I say ‘miracle,’ but if you’d seen this family 16 months ago, that’s what we were praying for,” Roman said.
“We’d kind of promised each other that if we ever found a solution for this that we’d do whatever we could as patients and a family to get the word out.”
With help from the device’s maker, Advanced Bionics, Roman started a Web site, www.raceagainstpain.com, as an online community for people who suffer from chronic pain and for their families.
It’s not about selling stimulators, Roman said, but about selling hope. Users can share stories, tell each other what relief efforts have or haven’t worked, commiserate and prop one another up. To bring awareness to the site, Roman’s car carries its address.
He speaks to groups of doctors and patients, alike. Upcoming is a trip to Walter Reed Hospital to address injured Iraq war veterans.
“Every doctor has a case that they’re not sure what to do with,” Roman said. “I’ve been begging them to take that one case, that train wreck like I was, and give him some hope.”
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