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Duties: Manages and directs physical medicine and orthotic personnel, materiel, equipment, administration and activities. Administers physical medicine and orthotic patient care. Implements treatment plans and coordinates activities to ensure effective and efficient delivery of patient care programs. Fits, fabricates, assembles, repairs and adjusts orthopedic orthoses.
Helping people be “their old self again” is one thing Staff Sgt. Shizuka Sanford likes about her job as a physical therapist. But sometimes, she said, the help she provides can be like torture for patients — even testing tough Marines like Gunnery Sgt. Robert Hall.
Staff Sgt. Shizuka Sanford knows she made the right choice when she crossed into the blue.
Seven years ago she tried to finance her way through college. But she didn’t earn enough to pay her rent and tuition working at fast-food restaurants and selling kid’s clothes at a mall. Plus, she hated her dead-end jobs.
Broke and with her bills piling up, she couldn’t even afford a car. So each day she rode her bicycle to school — an almost one-hour trip. She was miserable.
“I worked long hours,” she said. “And I was always sick.” Her prospects seemed dim.
But with her step-father’s urging, she joined the Air Force. It was the right decision, she said.
Today, Sergeant Sanford is a physical medicine technician with the 374th Medical Group, Yokota Air Base, Japan. She doesn’t worry about money or her health anymore. Instead, she’s delighted to be part of what she calls one of the most rewarding careers in the military.
“Joining the Air Force is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “I love my job. And I’m making a difference.”
Physical medicine technicians help patients regain physical functions after illness or injury. They work hand-in-hand with a physical therapist to improve a patient’s mobility, reduce their pain and prevent or limit permanent physical disabilities. Their patients include people suffering from lower back pain, arthritis, heart disease, fractures, head injuries and cerebral palsy.
But, Sergeant Sanford said, “Progress here doesn’t happen overnight.” The physical flight medicine staff measures every gain in days, weeks and sometimes months of painstaking labor. So it affords a warm and supportive environment to help patients become “their old self again.”
Still some patients consider physical medicine as a torture chamber intended to inflict pain. Some patients have yelled, screamed and even cursed Sergeant Sanford. Others affectionately call her “Sergeant Pain” or “Doctor Hurt.” Some crowned her the “queen of torture.”
The sergeant takes the commentary in stride. And though she’s tenderly reviled by some, one of her patients said the petite technician “is the most caring, hardest working and highly motivated” Airman she’s met. “She makes us do our best to help us get better faster,” the patient said.
Sergeant Sanford knows about “doing your best.” She grew up on Okinawa, Japan, with her Japanese mother and Marine stepfather. She spent most of her childhood attending local schools.
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“I was more Japanese than American,” she said. “I hardly spoke English.”
She then transferred to Kubasaki High School, a Department of Defense school at Camp Foster, Okinawa. After graduation her parents moved to the States. Sergeant Sanford stayed to go to college and, for a couple of years, tried to make ends meet. Then she joined the Air Force.
She didn’t know anything about physical medicine.
“I was clueless,” Sergeant Sanford said. To make things worse, her limited English didn’t allow her to understand some things her technical school instructors were saying.
“I didn’t even know the meaning of anatomy,” she said. “I had to take a medical dictionary everywhere I went.”
Struggling, she didn’t think she’d make it halfway through training. But she had a burning desire to succeed. So she studied harder and longer, sometimes falling asleep on her books.
“I pushed myself to the limit,” she said.
The hard work and perseverance paid off. Today, she preaches that valuable lesson to her patients. And she hasn’t slowed. During her short career, she’s been chosen physical therapy apprentice of the year in Air Force Materiel Command, and Airman of the year at her medical group at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. And she earned her Community College of the Air Force degree.
“The Air Force gave me the chance to excel,” she said. “And now I have a great life.”
But individual achievement is not what physical medicine is about, she said. Sergeant Sanford cherishes the everyday “little victories” at her clinic. Seeing someone take a step when they couldn’t even stand the day before is what makes her job so special.
“I enjoy helping people. It makes me feel happy,” she said.
Sergeant Sanford has a car now. And she can buy what she wants. She’s also fulfilling her ambition of going to school, something that has always been a dream. Not any more.
“I’m getting closer and closer to earning my degree in sports medicine,” she said.
