A young boy is on the road to an amazing recovery, thanks to the combination
of advanced surgery and an old-fashioned medical technique.
"He was sitting in the bathtub one night and I noticed he was sitting
crooked and I thought, ‘that’s weird,’" said Ann Bassett,
Nick’s mother.
"The X-rays showed that Nick has a spinal cord tumor. Well, you
watch the TV shows and the doctor shows and when you hear tumor you automatically
think cancer," said Vic Bassett, Nick’s father.
Nick’s tumor was not cancerous, but it was still very serious. Doctors
also had to deal with another problem – Nick’s worsening scoliosis.
"I need to fix things. I’m the guy who’s supposed to fix
things, and I couldn’t fix this," said Vic.
Specialists at University of Iowa Children's Hospital at University of Iowa
Hospitals and Clinics believed they could fix Nick’s spinal problems.
They took a two-stage approach – remove the tumor, then correct the
curvature of Nick’s spine:
"Well, they went into me. They cut me open and they got as much
tumor out as they could safely," said Nick.
Surgeons were able to remove the majority of Nick’s tumor. But because
of the extensive damage to his spine, there was no way to surgically correct
the scoliosis. So Stuart Weinstein, M.D., a University of Iowa orthopaedic
surgeon, used an old-fashioned technique—a body cast to straighten
Nick’s spine:
"This was the way these deformities were treated prior to the development
of modern instrumentation techniques," said Weinstein. "Fortunately,
I’ve been in orthopaedics long enough to have used these techniques
to be able to apply in some way like Nick’s."
Nick hopes to get his body cast off in late April 2002. By the way, Nick
is famous for his dinosaur calling. He won first place in his age group
at the 2001 Iowa State Fair.
|
