Distraction Osteogenesis
Today, Friday, was our appointment with Dr. Healey. He came in and introduced himself, sat down and chatted with Liam about what he enjoys doing and what he did before his cancer. Then he said, “Well, I know you came here to see me about your tumor. What can I do for you?”
Liam didn’t miss a beat. “So, I heard that your colleague can do an external fixator where you can regrow your own bone. Can you do that for me?”
Dr. Healey smiled and said, “So you want to talk about reconstruction.”
He got a thoughtful look in his eyes we would come to know as his signature. I’m going to start at the beginning. I know that you will know a lot of this; but it’s my job to explain it and I want to make sure you understand.
And then he spent almost thirty minutes explaining osteosarcoma, what it had done to Liam’s leg, how the different options for surgery worked, including the fixator. They no longer use external fixators because of the high risk for infection, but they do internal fixators and adjust them with magnets. As he explained the way the bone is manipulated downward and bone cells fill in it’s wake I got goosebumps! It was just like my dream!!! I heard God whisper, “This is your man.”
When he finished talking, David, Liam, and I looked at each other. We all knew without a shadow of a doubt what we wanted. Liam is a cautionary story. Dr. Healey said sometimes certain operations have a green, yellow, or red light. Liam is in the yellow zone because of the size of his tumor, the questionable response to chemo, and the three week delay while we should have been doing surgery. He palpated his leg and said the neurovascular bundle still moved and he was amazed at Liam’s knee flexion. Then he said, “I can usually tell who will do well with this by their attitude. He turned abruptly to Liam and put out his hand to shake it, “Liam, how are you today?” Liam looked a little surprised at the sudden shift in conversation, but said, “Pretty good,” with a lot of confidence. Dr. Healey said, “That’s all I need to know.”
He was far less depressing about the MRI results and said we really can’t know until we take it out whether that is cell death from chemo or outgrowing itself. The important thing was to get clean margins. When I told him we had started cycle 3 he said, “That’s what we would have done also. God didn’t come down from Mount Sinai and say, Thou shalt do two cycles of chemo and then surgery.” He actually helped devise the protocol and did so because the Jewish people refuse amputation. So to accommodate their religious beliefs, they knew they needed to form knee replacements. At the time, it took the manufacturers about two and half months to create a knee replacement. Two cycles gave them the perfect amount of time.
He told us that he had actually trained Dr. Prince and then sent him to Japan to learn how to do the fixator since that was the first surgeon to have done it in patients with osteosarcoma. “I think he’s in the OR today. Let me see if he can come talk to you.
We went back to the waiting room for an hour and then met Dr. Prince who was equally fabulous. He sat and explained the entire process to Liam. “You’re going to hate me at some point. That’s ok. That’s my job. But when this is over, you can do anything.”
“I can play football?”
“You can do anything you want to do. Well, anything your parents let you do.”
We walked out the door filled with hope; but most of all completely amazed at a God who showed us this plan when we had no idea it was available. And in His incredible love, had us scheduled for consult with the very few people in the world who could make it happen before we knew.