Mark Chilutti’s life is a jarring narrative of impossibly bad luck – except for a remarkable resilience that has left his spirit, if not his body, unscathed.
Chilutti has been a fundraising executive at Jefferson Moss-Magee Rehabilitation for more than 23 years. But his first acquaintance with the hospital was as a patient.
Chilutti was hospitalized in 1988 after a drunk driver left him with multiple broken bones, facial injuries that needed 100 stitches, and a traumatic brain injury.
He recovered fully – and never imagined he’d be back again.
But eight years later, Chilutti was shot by robbers who held up his jewelry store. The bullet severed his spinal cord, left him paralyzed from the chest down, “and changed my life.”
“I came to Magee for rehab and to learn how to move forward with my life,” Chilutti says.
He spent six weeks as an inpatient and almost a year in an outpatient program, “learning to do the things I loved in a wheelchair,” he says. The same resourcefulness that helped Chilutti become an Eagle Scout at the young age of 14 kept him focused on staying positive.
“I had way too much to look forward to,” he says. “I decided to move forward and focus on the things I could do and not what I couldn’t do.”
Chilutti began volunteering at what was then Magee Rehab, helping raise money. Then, a job opened as Director of Major Gifts.
“The job has been better than I could have imagined as I love being able to make a difference,” says Chilutti, now Assistant Vice President of Development. “Being a former patient, it gives me a whole different edge. I’m not talking about statistics. I am one of them.”
Chilutti has perhaps a unique perspective on just how much things have changed at Jefferson Moss Magee in the last quarter century. “It’s night and day,” he says.
“When I was here with a spinal cord injury, there were four patients in a room,” Chilutti says. “Now we have 83 beautiful all single rooms.”
The assistive technology “that now opens a whole new world for our patients,” was comparatively primitive and unaffordable back then. A program that enabled paralyzed patients to voice-activate a computer, for instance, was $4,000 just for the program, plus the cost of the computer. “Nobody could afford it,” Chilutti says. “Now, you can do it with a cellphone or a tablet.”
But not everything is different, Chilutti says:
“The one thing that hasn’t changed,” he says, “is the caring staff that we have that go above and beyond every day to help patients figure a way back.”
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