Word: labollita
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...last thing Robert Labollita remembers about the night of May 17, 1983, is 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...
...Both Labollita and Allison Sommers were candidates for amputation. But today Labollita is 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...
...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 like Labollita's, where the gap was more than 3 in. long, ordinary bone grafts fail for lack of an adequate blood supply to nourish them. Amputation may then become necessary...
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