Word: kneeing
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...Susan Lazarchick, the decision to undergo an experimental knee transplant was frighteningly simple. A benign tumor the size of a grapefruit was rapidly consuming her right knee and shinbone. Doctors had offered her two other options: amputation, or a bone fusion, which would render her stiff-legged for the rest of her life. She chose the rarely performed transplant. Last week Orthopedic Surgeon Richard Schmidt at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia announced that he had transplanted an entire knee -- bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments and all -- from an accident victim into the leg of the young...
...graft takes, Lazarchick, 32, will be numbered among a handful of patients around the world who have undergone at least a partly successful full-knee transplant. More than 100,000 transplants and grafts are performed each year on femurs, skulls and other bones, but replacing an entire knee, a procedure that has been tried on and off since the turn of the century, is especially tricky. Reason: doctors have not been able to save the sensory nerves that monitor the complicated three-dimensional movements of the knee. Explains Dr. Henry Mankin, chief of orthopedics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston...
...Sept. 30, Schmidt began the seven-hour operation by cutting a 2 1/2-foot long incision from the middle of his patient's thigh to more than halfway below her knee. He pulled back muscles and nerves, exposed the bones and the tumor; using a surgical saw, he then severed the femur four inches above the knee and the tibia, or shinbone, six inches below it. That done, he lifted out the old joint and tumor, trimmed the carefully chosen donor joint and inserted it into the twelve-inch gap. Using a metal rod and plate, the surgeon secured...
...transplant," Schmidt warns. "It's way too early to tell if there are going to be any complications," says Dr. Steven Gitelis, director of the bone bank at Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center. The once frozen ligaments and tendons may not properly hold the knee together, and the original cartilage may fail to cushion it from shocks. "I would wait at least a year to proclaim success," he adds. Even so, says Mankin, "I'm all for it. If Schmidt has solved the problems of this operation, I'll be doing it next week...
...animal tracks, examine the watershed. The soil surface is hard-capped and smooth -- no water can penetrate. The anthills are empty, and under the ground there are no worms. Only the tracks of jackrabbits and kangaroo rats mark the land. We're told this was once a cow pasture knee high in grass. The owners hunted antelope and quail here, and their steers were taken to market fat. Then we are told, "The city set aside this land 30 years ago for urban development and took the livestock off. It suffers from too much rest. The ecological functioning of water...