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thedrifter
12-10-06, 07:03 AM
Doctor rehabilitates patients in Southland and in trouble spots around the world

December 10, 2006
By Gregg Sherrard Blesch Staff writer

Mark Tracy redirected his life toward medicine after four years in the Marine Corps.

The Marines brought him in contact in the early '90s with doctors and nurses who were risking their lives to help starving Somalis in their African nation.

Tracy is a rehabilitation specialist who's new on staff at Little Company of Mary and St. Francis hospitals.

He wasn't sure what he wanted to do while growing up on a farm in central Illinois, but he didn't want to grow corn and soybeans like his father.

So he studied accounting when he left his family's land south of Champaign and traveled 20 miles up the road to the University of Illinois. His tuition was covered by a ROTC scholarship. In return, he promised the Marines four years after graduation.

"Once I got into the Marines, I started to think in a bigger way," Tracy, 38, said in an interview at his office on the campus of Little Company of Mary in Evergreen Park.

He recently started sharing the space with his wife, Dr. Roxanne Sylora, a plastic surgeon. The couple reside in Chicago's Beverly community.

Commissioned as an officer, Tracy was assigned to the 3rd Assault Amphibious Battalion and in 1992 was sent to Mombassa, Kenya, where the Marines were coordinating relief to Somalia. Crops and ports had been destroyed as warring clans vied for control. Tracy's job was to coordinate flights from Mombassa in and out of Somalia.

This was before U.S. and U.N. troops entered Somalia to restore order, an effort that ended soon after the nightmare siege chronicled in the movie "Black Hawk Down."

Doctors and nurses from organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, meanwhile, would get rides on the planes ferrying food relief, and Tracy resolved to become one of them when his Marine Corps duty was done.

"I realized how much they were helping the people," he said.

As soon as his four years of service were up, he enrolled at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford.

Making good on his pledge to use his skills to ease suffering abroad, he volunteered at hospitals in the Philippines after graduation. And after his residency at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, he signed on with a medical mission to Peru.

Last year, he traveled to Pakistan in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed more than 70,000 people and left many more severely disabled.

The importance of his field was highlighted during the trip.

Tracy arrived a few months after the quake to help Pakistani hospitals provide rehabilitation to victims whose primary injuries had been treated. In a state-run hospital, patients' lives had been saved, but they were languishing.

"They were getting internal medicine, but they were not getting out of bed and doing what they needed to be independent," he said.

A second hospital he visited had been improvised by volunteers in an abandoned cinema, where injured victims were learning to take care of themselves.

No further foreign trips are planned for now. The couple's first child, a son named Ronan, was born in August.

At Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital in Chicago, Tracy treats patients fighting to recover some level of independence after setbacks such as amputations, strokes and traumatic brain injuries. He has developed a special interest in managing pain during recovery.

Pain is the body's way of sending a message, and with chronic pain the message keeps getting louder, he said.

"The more you hear, it's like the more your body wants to tell you," he said, adding that the loss of sleep and depression caused by relentless discomfort stops people from healing and overcoming the pain. "We try to break that cycle."

Tracy responded carefully to questions about the Marines and soldiers now in Iraq, wary that his emotions might be interpreted as unpatriotic. But he's frustrated that so few of the country's citizens are paying a price for the commitment to go to war.

Nearly 22,000 have been injured in Iraq since March 2003, many of them with injuries from which they'll never fully recover -- in need of the kind of intense rehabilitative care he now provides.

"Servicemen and their families are bearing a huge burden from this war," Tracy said. "The rest of us, we can just tune it out."

Gregg Sherrard Blesch may be reached at
gblesch@dailysouthtown.com
or (70 633-5962.

Ellie