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MATT RAZINK
THE STAR NEWS
Thursday,
Thursday,
September
June 14,
22, 2012
2011
Fan support
Karla Klapatauskas, Carla Brost and their daughters Lindsey Klapatauskas, Laurissa
Klapatauskas and Emma Brost show their support from the Razink cheering section
in the Loge Level of Miller Park.
On its way
First pitch delivered
Photos by Matt Frey
Matt Razink’s first pitch is on its way to home plate and catcher Joe Crawford just
before the Milwaukee Brewers take on the Pittsburgh Pirates June 3.
Razink and new Michelangelo hand draw cheers at Miller Park
by Sports Editor Matt Frey
Matt Razink threw the baseball with
his right arm. But it was his left arm that
led him to the pitching mound inside
Milwaukee’s Miller Park on Sunday,
June 3.
The 36-year-old Medford resident
threw out the first pitch before the
Milwaukee Brewers lost 6-5 to the
Pittsburgh Pirates that afternoon. More
than 100 family members and friends
packed two busses and were among the
34,334 fans to root him on as he delivered
the pitch to Brewers’ video coordinator
Joe Crawford.
The pitch didn’t find the strike zone,
bouncing once into Crawford’s glove.
But, as Razink pointed out, it wasn’t the
first pitch to hit the dirt at Miller Park
this season.
“It was a little short,” Razink said.
“The guys at work said I’m just as good as
the rest of the Brewers. I would’ve loved
to throw a strike, but I didn’t. That’s why
they make the big bucks. I’d like to see
them come run my rock crusher for what
I get paid. It was fun.”
The pitching mound at Miller Park
was the furthest place from Razink’s
mind six years ago when a rock crushing
accident in Wausau took his left hand
and forearm. The last six months have
been a whirlwind for Razink, his wife
Katie, and their children Dustin, Kami
and Marcy since he was tabbed to be first
US civilian to receive what is known as
the Michelangelo bionic hand.
He was fitted for the hand in January
and then received it on national television during the February 22 Anderson
Cooper Show in New York City. Some
royal treatment from the Brewers followed and the family has done its share
of media interviews since then.
As life started settling back to normal
last week, the Razinks said while they
certainly never wanted the accident to
happen, there have been many positives
to dwell on rather than negatives.
“It was the best scenario of a bad scenario,” Katie said.
More on Michelangelo
The hand responsible for the attention is manufactured in Vienna by a
European company called Otto Bock,
which first introduced the product about
four years ago. An Iowa-based company
called Advanced Arm Dynamics worked
with Otto Bock in the development and
testing process. Ten US soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan had been fitted for the hands before Razink got his.
Razink is a patient and you could say
a product tester with Advanced Arm,
which has a clinic in the Twin Cities.
That’s a leading reason why he and the
Michelangelo crossed paths.
“I was a good candidate because of
where my amputation was,” Matt said.
“I usually break whatever they give me. I
do a lot of testing I guess. Just happened
to be at the right place at the right time.”
An electric opposable thumb makes
the hand one of the most life-like prosthetics one can find. It allows for stronger grasping power over other products.
Sensors inside the sleeve pick up muscle
and nerve movements in Razink’s upper arm, triggering the Michelangelo to
do its magic. Though Razink’s real hand
and wrist are gone, his brain and upper
arm didn’t forget how the full natural
arm functioned, which is what the sensors detect.
Ironically, getting Razink to break
habits developed over the last six years
is one of the bigger challenges of adjusting to the new hand.
“I had a robotic hand,” he said. “It
opened and closed, but you could hardly
get it around a small bottle of water. Even
though I would wear it, I’d be sticking
stuff under my armpit. You get in such a
habit. Even with this new one on, I know
it’s very capable of doing the task I need
to do. In six years I got in such a habit
of pinching everything underneath my
arm. That’s really a hard habit to break.
“I bet if a miracle happened and I wake
up tomorrow morning and my real hand
was there, I would open up the fridge
and grab a can of juice and put it under
my arm pit,” Razink added. “That’s just
the way it is. Thirty years of having two
hands and now six short years of not having one, it’s amazing how your whole lifestyle changes. The way you get dressed
in the morning, the way you do everything.”
Not only is Razink a patient with
Advanced Arm Dynamics, he’s also become a partner. The collection of prosthetic arms in the Razink house shows
Matt has tried several models, and there’s
no one better than a user to determine
what works and what doesn’t. In fact, he
still uses different models for different
tasks. The Michelangelo, for instance, is
forbidden from going to work with Matt.
A shortcoming for most models, Razink
said, is the lack of a life-like wrist.
“I designed a prosthetic wrist and got
a patent pending on it,” he said. “I have
activity specific attachments for it, fishing poles, tools, stuff like that. We actually signed a one-year exclusive agreement
with Advanced Arm on that.
“I always told those guys I could never
find what I wanted. But that’s what happens when you have two-handed people
making stuff for one-handed people.”
“One of the biggest miracles in this
whole process was he had never machined before,” Katie said. “Using a mill
and a lathe, he had never done that before. The beginning part of that phase
was he taught himself to use a mill and
a lathe. He just ordered up a bunch of
stuff. Once he taught himself to use the
machinery, that wasn’t good enough.”
Razink’s creation fits into a prosthetic
and, at the push of a button, the user can
change the attachment. He said it can rotate to 18,000 different positions.
“All that was out there was a wrist
that went one way,” Razink said. “It’s
set in with a set screw, so if you turn the
wrist, whatever attachment you had like
a hook or a wrench, it was always at a
wrong angle. So I made something that
had rotation on both ends. I have a fourway, that’s what my patent is for.”
The Michelangelo’s wrist doesn’t have
a rotating wrist, but Razink said it’s coming.
“That kind of turned me off to the hand
to begin with,” he said. “But the way the
hand functions, once they get the wrist
rotator, it’s going to be really good.”
Could have been worse
The day that changed the Razinks’
lives was May 30, 2006, the day after
Memorial Day. Razink was –– and still
is –– employed by Peterson Concrete of
Medford, crushing rock.
“We were working in Wausau when
they were building the new bridges,”
Razink said. “It was behind the new
Menards. We were crushing concrete
from old Hwy 29. My glove was caught
by a piece of steel rebar that was in the
concrete and it pulled me into a shaft
on a conveyer belt. Fraction of a second
and that was it. At least I was only two
blocks from the Wausau hospital when
it happened. The shaft was the size of a
pop can. It took my arm right around that
shaft right up to my arm pit. It broke my
bone from here to here (elbow to shoulder) four times. It was a miracle how I got
out of there and it didn’t pull my whole
Thursday, June 14, 2012
MATT RAZINK
THE STAR NEWS
Page 11
Razinks welcomed at Miller Park
Above left: Dustin Razink gets a baseball signed by Brewer infielder Brooks Conrad
moments before the game. Conrad homered in the ninth inning, but it only got the
Brewers within one in a 6-5 loss. Left: Marcy and Kami Razink raid the buckets of
bubble gum in the Brewers’ dugout. Above right: Matt Razink gets a kiss from his wife
Kate after throwing the first pitch. Above: Matt Razink wears the Michelangelo bionic
hand. He was the first US civilian to receive one. He was presented with the hand
on the February 22 Anderson Cooper Show. On that show, the Milwaukee Brewers
surprised the Razinks with an offer to join them for a spring training weekend and for
Matt to throw out the first pitch June 3.
body in there. All I remember is my hand
going in there backwards. When it got
to my elbow, my elbow must’ve went
around it the right way.”
The uninjured elbow was the first
lucky break. The second, in Razink’s
mind, was that it was his non-dominant
left arm that got caught.
“It would’ve been a night and day different story if it would’ve been my right
arm,” he said.
The forearm was amputated that day
and a closure surgery followed the next
day. Over time, four surgeries were required to place rods, plates and screws in
the upper arm. Now Razink’s left shoulder feels better than his right shoulder.
“When I got the call at first they didn’t
tell me what happened,” Katie said.
“Peterson’s office called me first. They
said Matt’s in the emergency room, you
should call over there and talk to somebody. I knew that he did a lot of torching and welding and I thought, ‘I bet he
burned himself.’ I was waiting for Dustin
to get off the bus. The girls were so little
they were napping. I thought we’ll go
over and pick him up, he probably needs
a ride home.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” she
said. “You have this feeling of relief, but
total shock at the same time. At least
once they told me he was OK, but he was
in surgery, the relief was there. But the
first six months was a blur for me. He was
recovering. Kami was 2 years old. Marcy
was 7 months. You just do it. He did so
good. Immediately he just kept saying,
‘this could’ve been so much worse.’”
Matt was home just six days after the
accident. The next six months were difficult ones, but the only choice was to
move forward and adapt.
“There were only a couple of low, low
days for him,” Katie said. “I was really
impressed because I didn’t know psychologically how he was going to do with all
that. He changed diapers. I had to go to
work. Timing wise it worked out fairly
well because it was the beginning of summer break for the kids. Dustin was 11. He
just stepped right in. Dustin was Matt’s
caretaker. The girls went to the babysitter when I went to work.”
In July of 2007, 14 months after the accident, Razink was back to work.
“I thought about doing something
else, but I had to try it, see if I could do
it,” Matt said. “Now all I do is recycle
concrete. I meet the beast every morning.”
Brewing up a reward
The Brewers teamed up with Anderson
Cooper to surprise the Razinks on the
show in February. The team offered the
family a weekend trip to spring training
in March and the opportunity for Matt to
throw out the first pitch June 3.
During the spring training trip, the
family spent time on the field during batting practice and talked with pitchers
Randy Wolf and John Axford, who presented the offer through a video link during the Cooper show.
“We loved it out there,” Matt said. “The
weather was great. It’s like watching a
baseball game at Whittlesey Stadium. It’s
awesome. It’s such a family atmosphere.
It’s really neat. The kids loved it. I would
definitely go for that again.”
The first pitch event got bigger than
the Razinks expected.
“Before we got back from New York
we had messages from people and people
calling on our cell phones wanting to go
to the game,” Katie said. “By the time we
figured out all those people, we actually
had more people than we could fit on one
bus. Then we weren’t sure if we should
stick our neck out for another bus because we had to pay for all of that stuff
and then fill the spots.
“We want everyone to know how
much we appreciate everybody’s excitement and support.”
“It was a long nervous ride on the bus
for me,” Matt said. “I didn’t practice at all
until Saturday when my brothers were
here. Me and Dustin threw a little bit. I
probably threw like 25 pitches. I knew if
I threw hard, I got wild. I could’ve practiced for two months. To step out on that
field is a totally different feeling. It was
quite the deal.
“It was cool because my whole family
from Minnesota came out,” Matt added.
“Katie’s family was all there pretty
much, and all our friends. Anyone we
could think of basically was there. A
Brewers win would’ve been a lot nicer.
But it was a good time.”