- April 17, 2024
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(Click here for more Standing O Award winners.)
Mike Cavaliere
Contributing Writer
Pat Leap reaches high for playing cards stuck to the wall with Velcro. Her arm shakes, more wobbly the higher she pushes it. Then she pushes it higher.
“Gravity is working against me,” she says, laughing. “Can you hear my shoulder clicking? I need some WD-40!”
Jim Bowe, owner of Arrow Rehabilitation, can hear the clicking, but he assures her that it’s normal. Expanding your range of motion is what occupational therapy is all about.
“I’m really concerned because I get fatigued easily,” she tells him. “Just going to Publix … it wears me out.”
Leap broke her shoulder recently, but with Bowe’s help she’s getting stronger. They work on hand control, stretching — techniques that will help her open cereal boxes on her own again, make food, clean.
“I was a cleaning fanatic,” she says. “Things had to be done perfectly.”
After the injury, though, she wound up in a nursing home. Now she’s reaching higher than she was last week. She’s gripping harder.
This is what progress looks like.
“It has been an amazing part of my life, helping all of these people,” Bowe says. “Therapy’s an art.”
And art is a field Bowe knows something about.
A regular performer in Flagler and Daytona Playhouse productions, Bowe didn’t act in his first play until he was 27 years old. He felt lured to the theater, he says, so he spoke to a counselor at what was then Daytona Beach Community College.
The counselor was blind, a seeing-eye dog by her side. But she saw something in him, he says.
Bowe got the first part he auditioned for. He got the second, too. Then he was offered a two-year drama scholarship. Since then, he has performed in more than 40 plays; he wrapped production this summer on a local film; and he’s always on the lookout for juicy new roles.
“There was something drawing me (to the theater), an inner spiritual thing, and that’s a pretty big thing for me,” he says.
But expression, for Bowe, doesn’t end at the Playhouse doors.
“It’s a very creative field,” he says of occupational therapy. “It gives people purposeful activates to do.”
Some patients might paint to improve their motor skills, build tile mosaics or make leather crafts.
“You have a more creative, broad scope,” Bowe says. “You have more free range.”
And the approach seems to be working. About 60% of Arrow’s business comes from return customers. The company nearly doubled its employee base this year, saw profits spike and enjoyed its strongest revenue week in its 12 years of operation this November.
Physical therapy wasn’t always the dream for Bowe, however. Entrepreneurship was. People would ask what he wanted to be when he grew up, and Bowe would say his uncle — the one who owned a gas station.
“By 10, I was pumping gas and had money in my pockets,” he says. By 16, he was working two jobs and helping with the family bills. By 18, he was running his uncle’s shop on weekends.
That was how it was in his family — a pack of eight brothers and sisters, dad working in a warehouse, mom putting in time at offices when she wasn’t taking care of the kids.
And the work ethic stuck.
Bowe was an industrial electrician before he found therapy. During college, he ran a painting business.
“I would be in rehearsals, go to class, change clothes in my truck, go paint, go back to rehearsals or a show,” he says.
His first job, Bowe was tasked with opening a clinic in Ormond Beach. He later shifted to inpatient rehab at Florida Hospital Oceanside.
“There was a lot of anxiety in that first year,” he says. “But my skills shot through the roof. … It locked in my future as a professional.”
So much of his success over the years, though, he credits to the stage.
“My whole professional career now has been magnified by the theater,” he says.
Acting has erased his limitations. The scene in his office might be set a little differently, but the way patients give immediate feedback when they’re scared or hurting or elated — for Bowe, it’s just another kind of audience.
“You never know where you’ll end up,” he says. “Sometimes you just get guided.”
