The immediate pain that resulted from Fleet Maintenance’s editor, David A. Kolman, landing directly on his left kneecap was excruciating, according to Kolman, who boats of having a high threshold for discomfort. He iced the knee down for most of the evening of the fall and figured the swelling, pain and misshapenness would be better in the morning.
He was wrong.
The swelling was not only still there, it had grown. So, too, was the severe pain and tenderness in and around the kneecap, which worsened whenever the leg was moved.
After much pain and effort to get into a car, his wife drove him to the emergency room of the renowned, and all too familiar to the both of them, OSS Orthopaedic Hospital in York, PA.
An X-ray revealed that his patella was severely shattered. The patella, the doctor explained, acts like a shield for the knee joint. It is a movable bone located at the front of the knee where the femur (thighbone) and tibia (shinbone) meet.
The needle
The first thing we need to do is reduce the swelling, the doctor informed Kolman. To do that, we need to extract the blood that has begun to coagulate in the knee.
The doctor left the room and returned with a very large hypodermic needle that looked, according to Kolman, like a prop from a Three Stooges show.
“What are you going to do with that?,” Kolman said joking. “I’m going to use it to remove the blood from that injured knee of yours,” answered the doctor matter-of-factly.
ORIF
While extracting a large amount of blood from his knee, the ER doctor told Kolman that his was a serious injury that could require an involved surgery referred to as open reduction-internal fixation (ORIF) surgery.
Word is, those in the adjoining examination rooms heard Kolman exclaim: “What in the world? That sounds awfully serious!” (This is a toned down version of what he actually bellowed.)
Calming down, he asked inquiringly: “What’s that surgery all about?”
ORIF is a method of surgically repairing a fractured bone wherein the broken bones are put back together with metal wires, pins or screws, the doctor explained. Broken pieces of bone too small to be fixed are removed.
He doctor excused himself, and said he would be back after consulting with an orthopaedic surgeon.
