Amputee seeks funds for transportation

SEATTLE — Wasilla High graduate Joshua Philbin’s legs may be prosthetic, but that hasn’t affected his drive to get back on a bike.

For months, Philbin was looking specifically for a Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter to ride through the streets of his current home in western Washington like he used to on a motorcycle in Alaska. Philbin actually purchased a 2011 version of his dream bike for a “screaming deal” with a loan, but he still needs to raise the several thousand dollars to pay it back.

The scooter is extremely important to Philbin for the long cruise he wants to take with his dad, but his story is much bigger than that.

A 1996 full-page Frontiersman story detailed Philbin’s battle with Hodgkin’s disease — a form of lymphoma — which included the removal of his spleen and later the loss of his lower legs to an infection. Philbin was a high school student at the time. Much has changed since then.

After he received his new legs, Philbin said, he worked with the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) for a while, then sought an associate’s degree in electronic engineering at ITT Technical Institute in Seattle. However, traveling to Washington for an initial visit took a toll on his already-weak immune system.

“My first trip down with my brother I ended up getting spinal meningitis and have had a couple other bouts of it,” he wrote in an email.

Philbin was able to attend and finish school at ITT, returning to Alaska shortly thereafter. He soon found himself facing another familiar dilemma.

“I was having a very hard time finding a job for an entry level EE,” he wrote.

So, Philbin went back to DVR. He “took some basic classes” and got certified as a computer service technician. Shortly after completing his certifications, DVR got him a job with the Mat-Su Borough School District, he said.

Five years later, Philbin decided to move back to Seattle, but not before having another run-in with the after effects of his initial illness.

“Over time I have dealt with pain in my walk and legs,” he wrote. “Eventually I decided to have my legs re-amputated to fix some problems that occurred during the first amputation when it was done in an emergency. I found a great doctor, Dr. Gardner at Denali Orthopedic Surgery who did a wonderful and careful job and made my legs and walking indescribably better.”

But having basically no immune system is a problem that doesn’t resolve itself easily, if at all, it seems. After about a year back in Seattle, Philbin said he began working at an Intel plant in the city of DuPont for a company called CompuCom, but once again he started experiencing worrisome health issues.

“Besides a few sicknesses here and there all seemed ok,” he wrote. “I don’t know when it started but I started having breathing issues where it felt like I was trying to live on baby lungs. I could not sleep lying down and would visit local (emergency rooms) where I would get patched up and sent on my way only to have it happen a couple weeks later. Eventually I got tired of the patch work and one night when I was having a bad attack I said screw it and jumped in my car and drove all the way from Auburn to (the University of Washington) Hospital and explained to them everything that was happening.”

The doctors found that Philbin had cardiomyopathy, also known as congestive heart failure, “most likely caused by my very first chemo treatment (with) a drug called Adriamycin,” he said.

There was a quick fix to the problem with some additional medication, so he returned to work essentially right away. Things were going well, but soon he returned to the emergency room, Philbin said.

“I had an episode where I felt weird and had a hard time concentrating,” he wrote. “When I felt my pulse it was extremely fast and out of rhythm.”

The doctors said it was atrial fibrillation, “livable but annoying,” Philbin said. The problems kept re-occurring, though — almost once a week — and his heart doctor spoke vaguely of the procedure that would potentially heal him.

“With things going south I made a tough decision to pack up and move back to Alaska to be closer to family because everything just seem to start crumbling and I felt like it wasn’t going to be much longer till the end,” Philbin wrote.

The “a-fib” episodes, as he called them, continued to the point where the doctors had to “defibrillate me back into sync,” Philbin said, but finally, he got some good advice.

Philbin was told to get a cardiac ablation procedure done, which actually destroys or scars tissue in the heart that triggers an abnormal heart rhythm, according to an article on mayoclinic.org. Philbin took the advice and has been “a-fib free” ever since.

Poor circulation is still an issue for him, however, and with the Alaskan winters as cold as they are, Philbin decided to move back to Seattle.

Though his health seems to have stabilized for the time being, something is still missing from Philbin’s life, he said.

“I want to have the freedom of movement again without having to rely so much on the bus schedule, or if my prosthetics will rub into my skin,” reads a post on his gofundme.com page, written before he purchased the bike. “I want to have transportation so I can find a job and be reliable in getting there and back, instead of always using the bus which can be late constantly. But mostly, I want to be able to go on a long cruise with my dad, which I have only dreamt of doing until now.”

In addition to paying back the loan, Philbin wrote on the page that any excess funds will go to the Make A Wish Foundation and possibly the Ronald McDonald House, depending on the amount of overfunding, as each organization has helped him in his various illnesses over the years.

More information is available at Philbin’s GoFundMe page at gofundme.com/ampandscoot.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.