Rhette Nyman

It’s funny how things come up in the right time and the right place. Has that ever happened to you? Well, a few nights ago, my roommates and I were having dinner. Lindsay, one of my roommates, asked me how everything was going. I told her that I was working on this blog about occupational therapy. She got really excited and started to tell me about her nephew, Rhette Nyman.

Rhette was born with VATER syndrome or VACTERL association. He did not develop the radial bone in his right arm and had no thumb. On his left hand Rhette had a nonfunctioning thumb. Rhette’s parents took him to a pediatric hand surgeon to discuss what they could do for him with a ulnar club hand along with his other problems. This tough little kid is now nine years old and has had eighteen surgeries that have included breaking and stretching his ulna, putting a rod into replace his missing radius, and screws in his arm. One of the most interesting surgeries that his mother, Amy Nyman, told me about was that they took both of Rhette’s index fingers and surgically made them into his thumbs. Rhette has worked extensively with occupational therapists to help him learn how to work with his arms and hands. Amy felt that, along with the work they did with Rhette, the custom braces they made for Rhette have helped him along this journey. They have mostly been in a clinical setting, giving the Nyman’s things to work on at home. Amy said the purpose was “to help Rhette use it more in every day life and to figure out how to do as much as possible. A lot of what the occupational therapists did was making the custom casts, evaluating, and then giving me ideas to try at home.” Because Rhette’s work with the occupational therapists he is able to do many things that other little boys his age are able to do. Of course, he has his challenges, but his life has been changed and enhanced on a new level. Rhette has the world of possibilities open to him because he has the use of his arms and hands.

Amy Nyman is a mother of four boys and because of her experiences with Rhette working with occupational therapists, she wants to go back to school so she can become an OT herself. “It is a field of so many of interesting and diverse things. My degree is in Special Education and so I saw occupational therapists working with my students, I know they work with older patients with strokes, or people returning from injuries. There is such a wide variety of things to do, that you can almost specialize in an area of occupational therapy, which I think is pretty cool. You deal with young people in a different way than you deal with a stoke patient, or someone who is eighty, or somebody who has lost part of a hand or arm. It gives you a really interesting diversity of people that you can work with and a lot of cool, different places that you can work. You have a real variety of possible settings, clinical, school, living homes, or you can go into people’s homes and work with that way with one on one with people. I just think that it is amazing what a diverse field it is.”