GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Mike Haaser said his new prosthetic leg is so good he can feel the ridges of a pencil when he steps on it.
He couldn’t feel much for years.
“I put this on in the morning. I take it off at night, every day, all day. That’s almost for two years now,” Haaser said during an interview with FOX 17 on Friday morning. “People with sockets can’t do that.”
Haaser’s new leg is called osseointegration. He demonstrated for FOX 17 how he snaps it on in a matter of seconds. Then, he stood up and walked around in it.
“Osseointegration is when a surgeon surgically inserts a metal post into the residual femur or tibia, whatever bone is left,” said Stephanie Rose, an amputee care liaison at Mary Free Bed. “And then the post can directly attach to the modular components of the prothesis.”
Rose said it helps make mobility easier, which Haaser was grateful for. For years, he wore a socket after his accident in March 2007.
“When the forklift ran over my foot, up to my knee, it acted like a big ringer washer,” Haaser recalled. "It just squeezed all the fluid from my lower leg up into the upper thigh, which ballooned all the skin away.”
Haaser said he was working as a mechanical engineer in a stamping plant in Mississippi when one day, he walked in the wrong direction and into the blindspot of a forklift driver.
“As soon as my seven-lace steel-toe workbook got stuck under that tire, at that point in time I knew the leg was gone,” he said. “I mean, some people have a hard time accepting or reacting to the fact. I knew the leg was gone right then and there.”
Immediately, a colleague who witnessed the accident made a tourniquet around Haaser’s leg, he said. An ambulance that was headed home turned around and picked up Haaser, who was lying in the aisle. He was then taken to a local hospital, and later airlifted to Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center in Tennessee.
Haaser said he was unconscious for a few days. But when he woke up, his family was by his side.
“My wife back then was Bonnie. But she just got diagnosed with breast cancer three months before that. So, she was just starting her treatment,” he said. “So, it was just like I just felt awful about all the inconvenience that I was going to cause everybody.”
However, Haaser persevered, undergoing many surgeries and procedures in Tennessee and at a facility in Cleveland. For years, he wore a socket to get around.
“I did really well on a socket,” Haaser said who hiked up part of the Appalachian with it. “But then once I became socket-intolerant I got to a point where I gave up. Gave up on sockets. Gave up on prosthetics. I didn’t give up on life.”
Haaser loved life. Prior to his injury, he hiked from Georgia to Maine. He was eager to get back to his passion but the socket was giving him blisters, he said.
He went through four or five of them but a chance encounter with a stranger in 2016 gave him hope, he said.
“When we were talking recently he said ‘I met somebody in a Meijer parking lot and that’s where I learned about osseointegartion,’” Rose said. “That’s when he started asking the questions and came to the clinic and started asking us about osseointegartion.”
Rose said Dr. Bruinsma referred him to doctors in Colorado, who specialized in osseointegration. They were one of the few in the country, along with Mary Free Bed, who were familiar with the surgery. Then, in the fall of 2021, after a pair of surgeries, he got a new leg.
He said it’s helped move around easier. He even wore it for dozens of hours consecutively during a recent trip to Houston with his award-winning robotics team.
“To see him now, we just went to a baseball game on July 30 and he was up and down the stairs and walking all around the concourse,” Rose said. “I heard him talking with other patients with amputations talking about his experience and he’s just an amazing guy.”
***Haaser will share his journey with osseointegration during a roundtable discussion on Tuesday, August 15 at 6:30 p.m. at the Mary Free Bed professional building (350 Lafayette Ave. SE)***
