Mine Victim Plays Tennis on High-Tech Legs : Medicine: It was a long, painful journey from double amputation to walking a mile. The Chilean envoy wanted a return to normal life--and earned it.

Hours after the land mine nearly killed him and doctors had amputated his legs, Chilean diplomat Luis Winter was determined to walk again.

It took more than a year, but with the help of sophisticated artificial legs and rehabilitation techniques, Winter is taking long walks and working on his tennis game.

“I want to return to my house, to my job, to ride the subway. Not as a man who has had an accident, but as I was before,” he said in February at Moss Rehabilitation Hospital.

In March, he succeeded. He returned to Chile to resume his job at the Ministry of Frontiers.

While in Philadelphia, he was on temporary assignment to the Chilean Consulate in the city. But his mission was his recovery. Winter, 52, spent much time at Moss’ Gait Analysis Laboratory, where human effort and technology combined to help him walk again.

“When you put on a prosthesis, it’s like a new set of tires on a car. You also have to align the wheels and balance them,” said Dr. Alberto Esquenazi.

Each prosthesis is a plastic tube with a movable ankle and foot made of light carbon-graphite, a material used in airplane wings. At the ankle joint, a ball joint allows flexibility and adjustment.

“I can adjust the X- and Y-axis. We can make little changes in tilt and rotation. As his gait progresses and gets better, we can compensate to fit the way he walks and balances his body,” Esquenazi said. “With the old type of prosthesis, you couldn’t do this.”

To study Winter’s progress, Esquenazi had him walk along a path marked out in the Gait Lab. Video cameras recorded his movements and special “force plates” in the floor measured his steps precisely.

Like sensitive scales, the force plates recorded the pressure as Winter’s foot touched down and as he put weight on it, then as he moved forward and raised his other foot for the next step.

The plates also measure side-to-side and front-to-back forces. A computer-driven laser shows the force and direction of the step as a bright red line, and a two-way mirror superimposes the line on the video of the moving leg.

“Before this, you had to make little adjustments to the prosthesis and ask, ‘How does it feel now, Sir? How about this?’ There is still some of what I call clinical decision-making, but I think we’re getting closer and closer to taking the guesswork out,” Esquenazi said.

Winter, director of borders for Chile, was inspecting a northern frontier area on Nov. 2, 1990, when his Jeep struck a long-forgotten antitank mine.

He came to the United States after the Chilean foreign ministry sought out places for treatment through Chilean diplomatic posts around the world. Moss is one of this country’s top hospitals for amputees with prostheses, and Esquenazi said he was interested in the case.

Esquenazi is an amputee himself. He was a young medical student studying to be a cardiac surgeon when a chemical accident in a lab blew off his right hand.

Depressed, he dropped out of school. But he came back, with a prosthesis and his knack for electronic gadgetry.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must have a special connection with your patients, because you know what they’re going through.’ I reject that. Do you have to get cancer to be successful at treating cancer patients?” Esquenazi said.

But he agrees that patients learning to use new artificial limbs are encouraged by what their doctor has accomplished.

It hasn’t always been easy for Winter. He endured intense pain when he first put on the new artificial legs.

He drove himself in therapy, going eight hours a day for eight weeks. He had physical therapy, occupational therapy and recreational therapy. He refused to give in to pain, fatigue or doubt, even though there was plenty of all three.

Soon his walking grew easier. First with two canes, then with one, then alone. The walks grew longer.

In his final months as an outpatient, Winter walked 2, 3, or 4 miles a day around his neighborhood.

This is fantastic for me,” he said with a smile. “It is difficult to run, but if I practice more, it is possible, too.”

Eventually, he played tennis, and beat his therapist.

“I played a doubles match the other day,” he said in February. “And the other players couldn’t tell I was on artificial legs. I could have had a stiff knee.”