Anyone who followed baseball, particularly White Sox baseball, in the late 1990s remembers Robin Ventura’s ankle injury.
It occurred in a spring training game in 1997, when the Sox star’s spikes caught in the dirt as he tried to slide home. He suffered a gruesome injury — a broken leg and compound fracture of his right ankle — that required four hours of emergency surgery.
Although he made a remarkable comeback and played in the major leagues another six-plus seasons, the ankle continued to bother him. Things just got worse after he retired in 2004. But a relatively rare operation, in which bone and tissue from a tissue donor are used to replace damaged cartilage, has him pretty much back to normal.
“I was having a hard time walking, doing anything, really,” he said recently from his home in California. “It hurt all the time. It kind of limited what I did. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do a whole lot. I found ways to not do things.”
One thing he did do was research, and he found that he had a couple of options. He could undergo an ankle fusion, which would permanently limit his mobility. Or he could pursue ankle-replacement surgery and have a metal and plastic joint put in. But then he found out about the osteochondral allograft.
“An osteochondral allograft transplant is essentially like a joint replacement but using biological tissue as opposed to artificial tissue,” said Dr. William Bugbee of the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., who performed Ventura’s surgery in 2005.
He likens the procedure to retreading a tire.
“We remove the joint surfaces on the ankle, about a centimeter on each side, then we replace it with a part that matches what we remove. It’s like retreading a tire rather than replacing a whole wheel.”
The allograft surgery, which uses tissue obtained from a tissue bank, was developed in the 1970s and early ’80s. Bugbee performed about 10 of the ankle surgeries in the late ’80s.
“About the mid- to late ’90s we looked at our results from the 10 we did way back when, and we said, ‘Hey, this worked pretty well,'” Bugbee said.
Since then he has done close to 200 of the ankle procedures (and another 500 or 600 for knees).
The typical patient would be a 50- to 55-year-old who has had an injury that was developing into full-blown arthritis. (Ventura was 38 at the time of his surgery.) The patient has gone as far as he can with medicine and braces, he’s too young for an artificial replacement, and fusing the ankle could cause future problems.
So for people like Ventura, the osteochondral allograft transplant is a good option.
His surgery — the operation itself is only two or three hours — went smoothly, and he went home the next day.
He spent several months in a non-weight-bearing cast, slowly getting comfortable and stable.
“First it was still a little sore,” Ventura said. “It was probably a full year till I realized it was exactly what I’d hoped for.”
And 26 months later, he’s golfing and coaching his kids’ sports teams.
“I feel like I can do anything,” he said.
“He’s had a good result so far,” Bugbee said. “When they go from pain with every step to no pain, they’re pretty thrilled with that.
“I tell them that every day, every week, every month they can walk without pain is a blessing.”
