Norbert Perez walks with his daughter, Alyssa, 16, at Rahway River Park, where he regularly exercises. “She was a big part of my motivation to get healthy,” he says.
BACK ON HIS
FEET HOW A SERIOUS DIABETIC FOOT WOUND WAS FINALLY HEALED
B
y his own admission, Norbert Perez is a stubborn man. He initially rebelled against the counseling he received after a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes four years ago. “They started giving me pills, but they weren’t working,” says Perez, 39, a forklift operator and Rahway resident. “They told me to change my eating KYONG KIM, DPM habits, my lifestyle. Healthy Together
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At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it. That typical man thing we do. We just go until we drop dead.” But when a callus blistered and his foot swelled “beyond belief,” he ended up at the Center for Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) Rahway. The diagnosis: a diabetic foot ulcer. “The first time we saw him, the wound was in very bad shape,” says podiatrist and wound care specialist Kyong Kim, DPM. “He had a bone infection, a nonhealing wound on the
fifth metatarsal, from the bottom to the top of the foot, very extensive.” “I was terrified because the first word that came out of everybody’s mouth was amputation,” Perez recalls. “I said, ‘No, I’m too young for that, you’re not amputating anything.’ I fought it.” “We were all in to help this patient,” Dr. Kim says. “We decided to go with an aggressive treatment of debridement—the removal of dead tissue—and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.” A hyperbaric oxygen chamber puts a patient in a pressurized environment in which he breathes pure oxygen, which
Summer 2022
5/31/22 3:52 PM
