Word: boned
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...driving from a restaurant toward his home in Dumont, N.J. The next morning Labollita found himself in a hospital in nearby Englewood. He had fallen asleep at the wheel, flipped his car and, in the resulting crash, knocked out a 4-in. segment of his upper arm bone, the humerus. The lower part of his arm dangled precariously from torn muscle and tendons. Labollita, now 27, recalls, "When I came to, they had already performed emergency surgery to remove the remaining pieces of bone." There was no hope of mending the shattered segment...
Suzanne Sommers of Clinton, N.J., was diapering her eight-month-old daughter Allison in 1977 when she heard a distinct pop in the child's leg. Ordinarily an infant's bones are so pliable that considerable force is required to break them, but in Allison's case, the tibia, the major bone of the lower leg, had snapped like a pretzel. When doctors examined the child, they found that she was suffering from a rare congenital defect known as pseudarthrosis (false joint) of the tibia. In the one out of 140,000 children who is born with this condition...
...lifting 50-lb. dumbbells with his recovered arm, and Allison, now 8, is running and jumping on two healthy legs. The treatment that made their recoveries possible is a delicate, experimental form of surgery called the free vascularized fibular graft. This procedure uses segments of the fibula, the secondary bone in the lower leg, to replace large sections of bone elsewhere in the body that are missing or damaged as a result of accidents or such diseases as osteomyelitis. It also opens up the possibility of saving the limbs of some of the 1,900 Americans who are afflicted each...
There is nothing new about using the fibula as a spare part. Important to four-legged animals, the bone is not essential to man, though the lower 30% helps to anchor the anklebone. As a result, surgeons have long used pieces of the fibula to patch damaged bones. "It is the outstanding transplant bone," says Dr. Harold Dick, chief of orthopedic surgery at New York City's Columbia- Presbyterian Medical Center. But traditionally, a simple bone graft taken from the fibula or from any of several bones in cadavers can be used to repair only a small area. In cases...
...grafts are possible. The procedure permits nourishing blood vessels to be transplanted along with the needed fibula section. The operation depends on painstaking microsurgical techniques developed in the 1960s that allow teams of surgeons, operating under a microscope, to reconnect the fragile transplanted vessels. Supplied with blood, the grafted bone will adjust to its new location and eventually become almost indistinguishable from the host bone...