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Two months ago, Jonathan Metz (pictured) nearly severed his arm when it became wedged in his furnace. Now, the West Hartford man has a new prosthetic arm and is making amazing strides with it, including woodworking in the very basement where he went through his ordeal.
“For somebody who went through such a terrible ordeal, to respond within three months, he’s done incredibly well,” said Dr. Scott Elner, his St. Francis Medical Center doctor. “And, using his arm already to woodwork, he’s going to back to work, shortly, back in his original job.”
Metz, 31, was working on his furnace on June 7 when his arm got. He screamed for hours but no one heard him. When he noticed infection was setting in, he took saw blades and nearly succeeded in cutting his entire arm off.
He remained in his basement for two days before friends summoned police to his rescue.
Jonathan appeared on NBC's "Today" show on Wednesday morning and said he is getting used to his new prosthetic limb, which he’s had for about a week.
Metz’s story became a national one and, with cameras rolling, he was surprisingly upbeat as he shared his story.
Matt Lauer asked Metz on Wednesday whether he’d had a chance to grieve the loss of his limb.
“I have,” Metz said, admitting that there have been some depressing days. But, in his upbeat way, he remains optimistic about his future.
“Really, it was the two to three weeks between when I got out of the hospital and the initial euphoria of just living wore off, before I was healed enough to start working on the prosthetic arm,” he said. “I still have some of those days, but this has given me a lot of optimism,” he said, looking down at his prosthesis.
He still feels some phantom limb sensation, but he has no qualms about going back into his basement. In fact, that is where he does his woodworking, something he finds therapeutic.
“It was before and is starting to be again,” he said. “The boiler is gone, and that was the one thing that I wasn’t ready to see again.”
Elner got married recently and Metz made a wooden chest for a wedding gift.
The BeBionic limb made by British company RSLSteeper includes a hand with five fingers that move individually under the control of a microprocessor.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From NBC Connecticut:
