New CFVH therapist

A new Physical Therapist begins work at Clark Fork

Valley Hospital.

The Physical Therapy Department at the Clark Fork Valley Hospital welcomed a new Physical Therapist, Stephanie McNolty. She comes from a teaching background, but found a new passion in life and has made it her mission to treat the body and soul of her patients. She comes from Savannah, Georgia and before that, Toronto, Canada.

McNolty said, “My patient was actually just laughing at me because I grew up in Toronto, Canada, my first 20 years and then my second 20 years were in Savannah, Georgia, which is where I just came from, so he is calling me a Canadian Southern girl now. He said there aren’t many of those.”

McNolty did not start out as a physical therapist, she said. Her first career was as a high school teacher, but after a life-altering event, she found that her new passion was physical therapy.

“My grandfather had several strokes, and so I quit my job to take care of him and I took him to physical therapy. I loved it so much that when he died, I decided to go back to school to become a PT [Physical Therapist].”

Today, it has been eight years since McNolty became a physical therapist. While working in Savannah, Georgia, McNolty said she worked as a physical therapist in an Intensive Care Unit.

Referring to the change of pace at the Clark Fork Valley Hospital, she said, “I was working with car accidents and gunshot wounds, and things like that, so this is a little bit different.”

For McNolty, physical therapy is more than healing the body physically. She explained that the healing of the body is meant to include the mind and spirit. By utilizing certain techniques, she explained that physical therapy is intended to give patients independence.

“Our job is… to improve the quality of someone’s life, and that to me is the most powerful thing you can do,” she said. Explaining in further detail, McNolty said, “If somebody has a disability or was in an accident, has an injury, or has a disease…, we can’t take it away, but we can make their life better by finding what matters to them and making them able to do things that they couldn’t do before.”

McNolty explained how one of her patient’s goals was to heal his soul. She said he wants to feel better physically to feel better about himself and the world around him. Referring to her experience with her grandfather, she explained how after his strokes he became paralyzed on both sides of his body, but she found a way to help her grandfather to ride a four-wheeled bike to help him meet a goal and regain independence.

“At the beginning it is an agreement between two people on how what matters to them and what they want to have changed in their life and then we work towards that goal,” McNolty said. She then said, “…It’s strength, it’s normalizing how they walk, it’s increasing motion if they lost something, but it’s bigger than that, it has to do with their own sense of independence, it has to do with them feeling proud of what they are able to do. Independence is what we are working towards, giving that back to people.”

After a trip to Yellowstone last year, McNolty said she wanted to come back to Montana. Coincidentally, she said she wanted to move to a small town and was looking for a different physical therapy position elsewhere and found the opening at the Clark Fork Valley Hospital. She says she is very happy here in Plains.