Congratulations to Trevor Pettigrew of Medford, Oregon, our second winner of Ensign Therapy’s SPARC. To assist him in completing his Physical Therapy education, he will receive a check for $2000.00. Trevor is a student who will graduate from the DPT program at the University of Washington in June of 2015. He is recognized by his academic mentors as someone who is ethical, caring, conscientious, thorough and personable. He is also the kind of student who consistently requests feedback and constructive criticism and is able to apply it to his practice. The SPARC judges unanimously chose Trevor and were touched and impressed by his personal story, a “must read” (below).
Essay by Trevor Pettigrew
Staring at the run-down “single-wide” in the middle of nowhere, I could barely believe my parents as they told my siblings and me that this would be our home for awhile. We had just moved from a pleasant neighborhood in a suburb of Los Angeles. The move itself had been stressful–caravanning up north, with merely the hope of a job and a home, and our pared-down belongings left in storage.
My dad’s company had been bought out and the employees laid off while I was in elementary school. While not extravagant, our comfortable lifestyle disappeared as my family was caught in the country’s economic downturn. After thousands of resumes, several low-paying jobs, and depleted savings, my parents decided to take a leap of faith and move to an area where my dad had often dreamed of living: southern Oregon.
The stark contrast of these two locales highlighted the fact that I had spent my early years in an area that in itself was filled with individuals of rich diversity. Unlike my mom’s stories of culture shock when she moved from a small town with a fairly homogeneous population in upstate New York to an inner-city neighborhood in Los Angeles she could afford as a graduate student/teaching assistant, I was, in fact, shocked by the relative homogeneity of my new surroundings.
Perhaps it was the fact that I had been homeschooled and had participated in activities with students from a widespread, metropolitan area. Unlike public school students who went to school with the same children they played with at home, my friends were spread out in various towns whose neighborhoods, homes, and families often varied drastically from mine. Quite frankly, because of the changes in my family’s circumstances, my lifestyle quickly changed from that of my neighborhood friends.
All these factors resulted in feelings of frustration, restlessness, and a subconscious, smoldering desire, a desire as yet un-named. The spark that ignited this desire came at a high price. It involved bigger losses than before, beginning with the incarceration of my older brother shortly before I started college. As devastating as that was, it paled in comparison to the losses to come. One week after I started college, my father died of a massive heart attack while out for a morning run–the first half of an incredible one-two punch that I felt would level me. And as stressful as it was when my mother underwent open-heart surgery a little over two years after that, the final blow of that one-two punch came several months afterwards when my younger sister passed away in her sleep due to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. While certainly dazed, I am thankful I was not knocked out and I didn’t submit. Instead, these devastating personal losses were the spark that caused that un-named desire that had been smoldering since after my earlier life circumstances to burst into full flame: I wanted to pursue life in a career that would allow me to make a positive difference in people’s lives by encouraging others not to lose faith and to keep on “keeping on” when they have been dealt blows in life, and I wanted to do that in a career that would not only allow me to be physically active but would also engage my mind as well.
All these circumstances–my homeschooling, the change in my family’s socioeconomic status, our move, and our losses—have helped me develop not only an ease with, but an interest in, widely disparate people as well as unique friendships that have enriched my life. They have driven me to pursue learning how to attain one’s best overall health through nutrition, exercise, stress management, and other lifestyle changes so that in addition to helping people in need of rehabilitation, I can contribute to the well-being of my patients by approaching them holistically.
At this point in my life and after these past two years of physical therapy education, when I think of how I hope to be a unique spark in the lives of my patients, I recall myself watching the evening news the day after Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, died. I find myself agreeing with a man in Tokyo who said, “Someone who did so much makes me want to do more.”
Just as the news story described Jobs as having “democratized” the digital world with his ideas and products, I would like to “democratize” the world of physical therapy, making it more directly accessible to everyone. This has many implications from the idea of integrated practices of physical therapists and other medical providers and the accompanying expansion of patient choices in treatments to the development of more cost-effective interventions which would open up direct access to physical therapists to the uninsured, for example. One of my goals is to be running a pro bono physical therapy program helping to promote primary injury prevention and wellness in our community as well as to educate the general population about the physical therapy profession as a whole.
In addition, based on my student experiences working with patients in physical therapy settings as well as on witnessing my mother’s past experiences in physical therapy, I envision promoting investigation into and consideration of the effects of factors such as a patient’s personal life and environment when developing a plan of care to better insure the patient’s adherence to the plan and thereby improve the prognosis. Every patient’s story and background is different, and I believe my life’s diverse experiences in combination with my physical therapy training have given me a unique well of expertise on which to draw to serve my patients with skilled physical therapy care, understanding, and compassion to the highest ability.