Community Health Education Major Isaac Ball Becomes a Physician Assistant
Physician assistant Isaac Ball, who majored in community health education at UMF, specializes in fixing fractures and repairing damaged joints at Franklin Health Orthopaedics in Farmington.
The work involves delivering range of services and treatments: evaluating x-rays, casting fractures, administering cortisone injections, and assisting the practice's two surgeons by suturing patients and writing up prescriptions. For a group of patients with multi-level trauma from a car accident, he might have to drop everything and rush to the emergency room to give an orthopaedic consult.
Of all the procedures he helps with, he says hip and knee replacements are the most challenging. "Those are long and physically demanding procedures," Ball says. "The human body is very hard in terms of bone structure. For joint replacements, you usually have to use hammers, drills, saws, and osteotomes [chisel-like surgical tools]. My job in those cases is to assist the surgeons, retract the wound so they can get good access, and suture."
At the invitation of UMF's athletic training staff, Ball spends Friday afternoons during the academic year back on campus, treating and evaluating student-athletes coping with everything from sprained ankles and jammed fingers to ACL injuries and stress fractures.
"Working with UMF athletes is especially rewarding," says Ball. "They're always compelled to get back to their sport as quickly as possible, so they tend to work harder in the rehabilitation process. You don't have to motivate them." Ball traces his interest for working in orthopaedics and with athletes to his senior year at UMF, when, as a community health education major, he completed his program-required internship with Dennis Flanagan, a physical therapist who owns and operates Allied Physical Therapy in Farmington.
"That was my introduction to clinical work, and Dennis was a phenomenal teacher. It was, at its core, all orthopaedics-helping patients, many of them athletes, recover from joint-related injuries," says Ball. "With all that experience, I had a natural comfort level with orthopaedics in PA school."
Asked about his most rewarding outcome thus far, Ball tells of a patient who received double-knee replacement surgery. Four months after the surgery, the patient walked into Ball's office to shake his hand and thank him for all he'd done.
"That was special, to know you really changed that person's life. With the new knees, he had a new lease on life," Ball says. "After dealing with complex cases, I always ask myself, 'Did I diagnose them correctly? Did I do all the right things? Did I do everything I could have done for the patient?' Any time they come back and tell you they're better, that's really gratifying."
-- By Marc Glass, managing editor of the UMF alumni magazine
