HERSHEY, Pa. — As often as six times a week for more than half a century, Jim Morton awoke in the middle of the night with pain in his feet.
You’re shaking the bed, his wife would sometimes tell him.
Morton would lie back in the dark wait for the stabbing to go away. He couldn’t do anything else ─ couldn’t strip off his socks, rub where it hurt or stretch his toes.
The aching feet weren’t there.
They’d been blown from his body in a blast from an artillery shell in a jungle in Vietnam in 1966. The explosion killed one man, wounded another and took both Morton’s legs when he was 20 years old.
Six weeks ago, that half-century of torture became a memory. Dr. John Roberts, a plastic surgeon at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, performed a new procedure called targeted muscle reinnervation on Morton. For the first time since he learned to walk again on prosthetic limbs, the pain is mostly gone.
It began generations ago, a few weeks after Morton was wounded. At an Army hospital in Valley Forge, he told the doctors his feet were killing him. How could that be since he’d left both of them near the Dong Nai River in South Vietnam in an area they called War Zone D?
It’s in your head, the doctors told him.
Over the decades, the ghostly pain continued to haunt him. He spoke with other doctors. Like more than 85% of amputees, Morton had phantom limb pain, and there wasn’t much they could do. They could give him pills, but Morton refused to take narcotics. They suggested Tylenol. Mostly, he just lived with the excruciating, almost nightly reminder of what had been, and the day it all changed in a flash.
Roberts wasn’t sure targeted muscle reinnervation would work on a 76-year-old man with amputations in the distant past.
But for the month and a half since the outpatient procedure, Morton hasn’t been tormented by pain he can’t reach in limbs he lost halfway across the globe 56 years ago.
“I’ve waited a long time for this miracle,” he said.