Dog Bite Shapes Woman’s Resolve, Zest for Life

The summer before Vaughan DeBarr turned seven, she was visiting cousins in Pensacola, Florida. They were playing in the neighborhood cul-de-sac when a pit bull began charging in their direction. Initially they thought the dog was lost, but the closer it got, the more it growled at them. They started to run for the house, but DeBarr fell behind and the dog bit down on her left calf and hung on. “He wouldn’t let go, and he started to drag me back to the yard he came from,” remembers DeBarr, who was living in Germany at the time of her summer visit. “This was the 1970s and there was no 911.” Her cousins ran for help at a neighbor’s house. The woman screamed for her husband to call the police, DeBarr says, who remembers that the man then came out of the house “with a crowbar and tried to get the dog off my leg.” [caption id="attachment_269287" align="alignright" width="314"] DeBarr’s journey with limb difference and eventual bilateral amputations began when she was six years old and was attacked by a dog.[/caption] Nearly 30 minutes passed before the police arrived. “When the officer came, he pulled a shotgun out of his car and started toward the dog and me,” DeBarr recalls. “I had seen a movie where they had to put a horse down because it was lame. That’s the last thing I remember. I thought the officer was going to put me down because the dog had chewed up my leg and now I was lame.” DeBarr was taken to the hospital, where a tourniquet was placed on her upper leg while they waited for her parents to be notified. “There were no cell phones at the time, and my mom and my aunt were out shopping,” she says. “My uncle sat with me until my dad could come.” DeBarr’s father, who was stationed in Germany, arrived at the hospital by helicopter about six hours later and gave consent for surgery. “They should have amputated my leg back then, but my dad insisted they save it because he didn’t want a ‘cripple’ in his household,” DeBarr says. Long Recovery DeBarr remembers waking up in the hospital following surgery and throwing up all over a big red teddy bear her uncle had bought to comfort her. She was wearing a cast from her chest to her left foot and was told that she had received more than 550 stitches. DeBarr’s parents were advised that her leg would no longer grow normally because of extensive tissue and muscle damage. [caption id="attachment_269286" align="alignright" width="361"] DeBarr experienced limb difference before her first amputation, as her left leg was significantly shorter than her right.[/caption] After a three-month hospital stay, DeBarr and her family returned to Germany, where she spent another nine months in an Army rehabilitation hospital to learn to walk and stand again. By the time DeBarr reached adulthood, her left leg was six inches shorter than her right leg. “I never had anything like special shoes to support this,” she says. “And it didn’t deter me from playing sports like cheerleading, softball, and soccer through high school.” A Challenging, Difficult Rehab By the time DeBarr entered her 40s, she had moved to Florida and had endured more than 28 reconstructive surgeries, which included experimental bone and skin grafts, as well as transplanted veins and arteries. “I was lucky to find a vascular surgeon in Tampa who was honest enough to tell me the truth that my leg should have been amputated when it happened. He told me it still wasn’t too late [to consider amputation].” DeBarr agreed to a transtibial amputation on May 10, 2013. DeBarr had never met anyone with an amputation prior to her surgery. During that first year of recovery, she says she became depressed, and her weight rose to more than 310 pounds. “It took almost a year of depression, anxiety, and PTSD for me to realize that I needed to take my life back and try to live it to the fullest.” DeBarr joined a gym, where she found her love of all things fitness. “I soaked up every Zumba, kickboxing, TRX, and boxing class I could find,” she says. DeBarr eventually discovered powerlifting and strength sports. While it was through these sports that DeBarr dropped 120 pounds, there was a downside. “My marriage did not survive the amputation,” she says. Working With Martin Bionics Wanting to put the divorce behind her, DeBarr accepted a new job and moved to Denver in 2015, where she began competing in Strongman competitions. In 2017, however, she began experiencing health issues and had also fallen several times. She returned to Florida, where her vascular surgeon told her she would have to have a transfemoral amputation. “This set me on another spiral of depression and anxiety because I thought without a knee my life would be over,” DeBarr says This time, however, DeBarr did not sink into the depths of depression. “Thankfully, I had the support of the strength community, my coaches, and my church family,” she says. “I worked out and started lifting again.” It was during a Strongman competition that she met Jay Martin of Martin Bionics who offered DeBarr an opportunity to participate in a prosthetics research study of a new technology called the Socket-less Socket. “It really changed my life,” says DeBarr, who began working for Martin Bionics, initially responsible for the company’s social media platform. Now she’s the clinical network manager and patient model. (She also met her second husband, Damion DeBarr, in May 2018, and they married on Halloween. “When you know, you know,” she says.) Amy Skuta, CPO, director of client operations, Martin Bionics, Oklahoma, has been in O&P since 2008 and a clinician since 2012. She began working with DeBarr in 2018. “Vaughan came to the [Oklahoma City] clinic after I was hired to have an adjustment on her current cX design socket,” Skuta says. “Her primary focus was weightlifting at the time, and after a lengthy socket overhaul we were able to get her back up and pumping.” Another Setback In 2019, DeBarr began to experience neuropathy in her right foot. Her physician gave her the bad news that her vascular disease had spread, and with the possibility that it would only get worse, the surgeon recommended a transfemoral amputation of her right leg. DeBarr says recovery and rehabilitation was harder than she expected as her journey with bilateral amputations and C-Legs began, but she was determined to maintain her resilience. Skuta says, “[DeBarr is] never satisfied, but in the most encouraging way. She is always challenging herself and creating new goals. Once she accomplished one goal, she immediately moved on to the next. That kind of perpetual determination is hard to come by but fun to work with.” [caption id="attachment_269288" align="alignright" width="329"] DeBarr did not let her paraplegia stop her from competing in the Arnold Strongman competition in 2020.[/caption] DeBarr thought by the holidays she would be back to training to compete again in 2020. On Christmas Day, however, she woke up paralyzed from the waist down. She had had a spinal stroke as a side effect of lupus, which she did not know she had. “They told me I’d never walk again,” says DeBarr, who turned to food again for comfort. Her weight reached 250 pounds. DeBarr managed to not only lose weight and learn to walk again, but she returned to Strongman competitions. She also continued working, including her advocacy work, and she began speaking publicly about her experience. Enter OI When DeBarr turned 50, she says she started to feel more tired and needed more time to recover from all her physical activities. She began extensively researching osseointegration (OI). “It took me several years to get approved because I was also a paraplegic. I had to demonstrate my ability to be active even though I was paralyzed,” says DeBarr, who was approved for OI in February 2024 and had her first surgery that May using Integrum’s OPRA implant systems. Her final surgery came last December. Stuka says OI was the best decision for DeBarr. “Due to her constant health improvement journey, her limb volume and fluctuations became more challenging to fit long term,” she says. “In addition, her lasting hip weakness from her spinal stroke continued to create leverage issues that OI could effectively address.” Prior to OI, DeBarr was using custom skin-fit brim-designed sockets, Skuta says. “Her socket evolution has evolved with each new set of sockets as each new set brought her a new set of challenges,” she says. “Her socket needs and designs kept evolving because she did. More than anything, she pushed us to think outside the box as much as we pushed her to keep moving forward.” Rob Burcham, CP/L, director of sales and production, Martin Bionics, has been working with DeBarr since 2024 and says that she often struggled to become a full-time bilateral prosthesis user. “With her partial paralysis she has trouble with proprioception, and with OI she can now feel where the prosthesis is through her bones,” he says. Burcham and Skuta agree that OI is a better fit for DeBarr, given her active lifestyle. Currently DeBarr uses weight bearing devices, locking knees, and College Park Sidekicks with a walker. “They are much easier for her to don and doff. The bone anchoring also helps with her muscle imbalances that resulted from the spinal stroke,” Skuta says. “She has already worked on how to navigate the imbalance during gait through her work in bilateral above-knee sockets. The OI just allows her to better utilize her body weight for leverage. It also limits her trips to the clinic for socket adjustment needs, decreasing downtime due to poor socket fit for her constant limb changes.” DeBarr says she has no plans to slow down. “I have become more active without the weight of an entire prosthesis and began losing more weight,” she says. “I am confident when I take my steps. The biggest thing I feel is that this is the next best thing to having my ‘real’ legs because the implants are in my bones, so when I walk it feels like they are my legs rather than prosthetics.” Her next step will be to receive OPRA Axor devices, and she says she’s on tap to receive her microprocessor knees this fall. She also has a new bucket list that includes a trip to Antarctica and Greenland. “Wish me luck,” she says. Betta Ferrendelli can be contacted at betta@opedge.com .

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