Orthopedic surgeons from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis operated Feb. 19 to save the leg of 11-year-old Jean Patrickson, who survived the earthquake in Haiti and was flown to St. Louis for treatment.
Jean will need more surgery and intensive rehabilitation, but he should recover from his injuries, says J. Eric Gordon, M.D., associate professor of orthopaedic surgery, who led a team that worked for more than four hours to replace bone that had been removed from Jean’s leg during an earlier surgery.
The leg was crushed when the roof of his Port-au-Prince home collapsed during the quake. He eventually was taken to Sacre Coeur hospital in Milot, about 75 miles north, where surgeons did an initial operation.
A dozen of the other 50 children at Sacre Coeur needed amputations after the earthquake, according to T.R. Lewis, M.D., a fellow in orthopaedic surgery, who cared for Jean in Haiti after traveling to the island nation to provide medical treatment to earthquake victims. He says it was a difficult but rewarding two weeks of work. When Lewis returned home, he wondered whether he would ever see Jean again.
But several humanitarian organizations worked together to secure a trip to St. Louis for the boy. So shortly after his arrival in St. Louis, Jean saw a familiar face.
“As soon as I came in to see him, his face kind of lit up,” Lewis says.
Doctors at Sacre Coeur had been forced to remove an infected 7-inch section of the tibia, one of two bones in the shin, and Jean left that surgery missing nearly the entire stretch of bone between his knee and ankle. Without that bone, Jean faced amputation, and the surgery he needed to repair the injury couldn’t be performed in Haiti.
Washington University surgeons performed Jean’s operation at Shriners Hospital for Children in Frontenac. Gordon, Lewis and the team split Jean’s right fibula, which runs alongside the tibia, and used a piece of that bone to replace the adjoining bone that had been removed in Haiti.
That piece of bone then was strung with wires and connected at the top and bottom of the remaining pieces of tibia. The doctors essentially are trying to grow a new bone to replace the piece that had to be removed.
“Usually we have a lot more bone to work with when we do this kind of an operation,” Gordon said. “But he should do fine. The surgery went very well.”
Pins and screws placed in the bones will help them stretch about one millimeter a day. Over time, the bones should grow and fuse together to replace the bone that was removed from Jean’s leg in Haiti.
Jean will wear a circular brace around his shin for at least six to nine months to hold everything in place. He’ll need another operation in about six weeks and at least one more surgery to remove the brace. Jean eventually will be able to walk on his own, but Gordon said he believes Jean’s injuries may leave him with a slight limp.
Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.