Amy Malone, MPT, PT, MS, ATC, attended the Pacific Rim Conference in Oahu, HI, for the first time in March 2006. She went to present on "Barriers to Access for Kids with Cerebral Palsy," a project she and her colleagues had been working on for some time through Governor State University in University Park, IL.

"My mentor and teacher [a physical therapist as well] got the NIH (National Institutes of Health) grant to do this piece. It was actually a three-fold project, and one of the projects was the "Barriers to Access for Kids with Cerebral Palsy," Amy said.

John Siciliano also flew to Oahu for the conference. An actor and speaker in California, as well as an above-the-knee amputee, he had been asked to attend by Ability Magazine for a benefit for Habitat for Humanity. While there, he would help build a house and perform a solo piece at a fundraising event. John's performance was an inspirational speech about his life, detailing the car accident that took his leg, his successes and failures as a paralympian and his work today.

Neither Amy nor John anticipated anything more than professional development, networking and quality time in Hawaii to come from the conference.

But that was before they met.

 Boy Meets Girl
In addition to John a long lineup of performers and speakers were scheduled for the Habitat for Humanity benefit, such as Max Gail, an actor best known for his role on Barney Miller, and the then reining Miss Hawaii, Miss Deaf Hawaii and Miss Universe. The performers were seated at a designated table at the front of the room and, initially, so were Amy and her colleagues, who had purchased tickets for the event.

"My little group was seated at John's table when we first got there," Amy explained. "They introduced us, and I was like 'Oh! Who's that guy? He's kind of cute.' I had no idea that he was an amputee.

"Then they moved us."  

Shifted from the actors' table to a guest table at the back of the room, Amy was left to consider John from afar. For his part, John had a show to prepare for, and though he noticed the "cute PT" immediately, had to tuck her into the back of his mind until after the performance.

But even then, there wasn't much time for the two to connect.

"At the end of the show, Amy came up to me (after a show, people come up to congratulate you and stuff). I wanted to talk to her more, but there were so many people that she kind of left, and I was just like 'Oh, man! Am I ever going to see that girl again'," John said.

Amy disagreed. "He didn't care. He didn't remember me. He did not even remember me."

Amy left the event with her self-described tail between her legs. With no other plans and not wanting to stay in the hotel room with her conference roommate and new fiancé ("he came to Hawaii to propose to her," Amy said), Amy went to an Irish Pub.

As luck would have it, so did John.

"We go in there, order a drink. [and] all of the sudden here comes Amy out of the bathroom at 2:30 in the morning. The music stopped; cue the fan. I was like "'WHOA! There she is,'" John said.

"And here I am thinking, oh my gosh, I haven't looked at myself in like an hour. I have no idea what I look like," Amy added. "Hopefully I don't have food in my teeth. But then [after we talked] we exchanged phone numbers. He left that day, and I left a couple days later."

Girl Calls Boy
The couple's first official date came as Amy made here way back to Illinois from the conference. She had a 12-hour layover in Los Angeles, the perfect opportunity to meet John and get to know him a little better.

"She arrived at six in the morning." John said.

"It was 7 in the morning," Amy corrected.

"Very early," John continued. "I couldn't believe that she actually took a cab to my apartment. When the doorbell rang in the morning, I was like 'Wow. This is for real.' We had a great day. We hung out, went out to lunch, and I took her back to the airport.

"And then she left."

Amy returned to Illinois; John remained in L.A. With 2,000 miles between them, continuing the relationship would be a challenge, but it was a challenge the couple faced determinedly.

Throughout the summer they attended events, both social and professional, together. They were each other's wedding dates. She flew to meet him at the Extremity Games in Florida. And when John taught at a camp for amputee children, he asked Amy if she would like to volunteer as well.

After the summer, they looked toward the holidays, flying back and forth through December. Once the season was over though, John realized he needed a new reason to be in Illinois, preferably one that kept him there for several months. He found it in a play.  

"I put my little antennas out there to my buddies saying, 'I want to do a play in Chicago. I really like this girl. I want to spend some time with her'," John said. "I found a script and ended up going to Chicago for 3 months and doing a play called Operation Infiltration: An Experiment in Terror."

"It was very flattering," Amy said of John's bold move. "We just got along so well. There were so many pros to our relationship. It was good. It was a good time in my relationship and a good time in my life. But I was thinking, 'Well, where is this going to go from here?'

"Then a stormy night in July he proposed to me."

Boy Asks Girl
The proposal took a considerable amount of planning on John's part. He wanted to surprise Amy, but at that point, he had returned to L.A. and she was still in Illinois.  And orchestrating a surprise of any size (let alone one as important as a proposal that spanned states) for a woman like Amy is difficult, John said.

"PTs, OTs, you people in this industry are very structured. Here I am as an artist. We live by pencil. But I'm like, 'I've got this ring, I'm going to surprise her,'" John explained. "So, I had to do some smoke and mirrors."

He convinced Amy he was working all night and wouldn't be able to answer the phone, and then boarded a plane from Los Angeles to Chicago. When he arrived in Illinois, John hailed a cab in the pouring rain, picked up a bottle of wine and flowers, and then pulled up to the door of her apartment and knocked.

 "A single girl living in a garden apartment in Chicago and he knocks on the door at 10 o'clock at night," Amy said. "A garden apartment. I'm not answering it."

John continued to knock, but Amy continued to ignore it, growing increasingly more nervous. Eventually, after Amy had called John about the knocker (forcing him to scramble to turn off his phone), John gave up on surprising her at the door and took out his keys.

"I hear the keys, and I'm like, huh.I had no idea what was going on. And in retrospect, I didn't take any sort of stance of fighting or anything. I was just sitting there like a sitting duck. Like, 'All right Mr. Killer. I'm here.' I don't have any sort of mace or pointed shoe. I was like, "Oh gosh, this isn't going to be fun,'" Amy remembered.

"[When he opened the door], I start crying, because I'm so emotional from being so scared. and then John got down on one knee, all soaking wet in my kitchen, and proposed to me.

"And I was just, 'Oh my God. Do it again.'"

Girl Says Yes
"So we took a mulligan," John said, and the second time around, Amy said yes. However, there was still the problem of location. Amy had established an impressive career as a physical therapist in Illinois. She was working with the WNBA team the Chicago Sky and Athletico, a provider of orthopedic rehabilitation in the Chicagoland area. But John, as an actor, needed to be in Los Angeles.

Amy decided to move to California.

"I finished that WNBA season up and then I let my boss know that I was going to be moving. I moved out here in September of 2008," Amy explained. "Now, we're two months away from our wedding -- August 8. We're getting married in a small town in southwest Michigan, in a vineyard."

"We're juggling the world of John the artist/actor, and Amy the physical therapist," John said. "And she's running her own clinic now. Our dream is to have dual residences. We're living in Chicago and here, because I kind of have to work here and her family and stuff is there. We want to make it work, so we're going to go back and forth."

Amy is currently a physical therapist at Vargo Physical Therapy in Sherman Oaks. She has established herself as a respected health care practitioner in the Los Angeles area. With her professional and personal paths on track, there is only one question left:

Does she practice physical therapy at home?

"Only if he can show me a deficit," she said.