Orthopedic Trauma
Trauma is a physical force applied to the bone that the bone cannot withstand. Orthopedic trauma surgeons work with other specialists to care for fractures, dislocations, breaks and traumatic injuries to your musculoskeletal system from collisions, blows, slips, and falls.
At UVA Health, you'll get care and support in our Level I Trauma Center.
Surviving the Wreck: Lisa's Story
Hit by a drunk driver, Lisa suffered fractures in her neck, back, ribs, hands, legs and knees. Broken and bruised, she came to UVA Health.
LISA BLACK: My name is Lisa Black, and I am a hospital teacher here at the University of Virginia Children's Hospital. On October 3rd, I was involved in a car accident. I had just left work here at the hospital. And I was headed home to pick up my children. I was hit head-on by a drunk driver.
WINSTON GWATHMEY, MD: My chief resident called me and said we had a car accident. And this person has been brought to our emergency room with multiple injuries.
LISA BLACK: Four fractures in my neck, two in my back. My lung had collapsed, and I had multiple broken ribs. And my collarbone was broken. I had multiple broken bones in my hand. I had a dissected artery, which alone could have killed me. My femur was broken. Also, my knees, they were just crushed.
GWATHMEY: As the orthopedic surgeon on call, what you try to do is you try to identify the most severe injuries, those that need to be stabilized immediately. We ended up putting a titanium rod into her let femur, emergently, in order to stabilize that long bone. And we placed a metal frame on her right knee after cleaning out the debris from the accident out of her knee. So we put her into a frame.
DAVID WEISS, MD: Then she had another surgery to take off the external fixators and put some plates and screws, first in her right leg. And then she had a ligament reconstruction on her left leg by Dr. Gwathmey. So that was two major surgeries.
LISA BLACK: Every morning, they would come in and touch the bottom of my feet and ask me if I could feel it. And for a long time, I could not feel it.
GWATHMEY: She told me from the get-go that she wanted to run again. And we wondered about that goal, and whether we would be able to achieve that. She couldn't walk for eight weeks, because she was not able to bear weight on either leg. And we're talking about running. This seems like such a distant hope. But at the same time, as an orthopedic surgeon, there's no reason not to establish the highest possible goals for our patients.
WEISS: She was just very determined to get better. She wanted to get back to running. And she works as a teacher with kids who are not able to get around very much. And her life just involved a lot of activities. And she wasn't going to let this set of injuries keep her down.
LISA BLACK: I had therapy five days a week, for two to three hours at a time, because they were working on both legs. So it was intense. You have to bend your legs quite a bit to get back into the chairs and work with the children on their level. And I worked every day with my therapist at physical therapy so that I knew that I could come back here to serve the patients.
I'm back. I'm teaching now. I'm in the small chairs. I'm with the kids here that I love. I'm running again, and taking care of my own family, my kids, doing the things that I love with them.
GWATHMEY: This is the reason why orthopedic surgeons go into orthopedic surgery is Lisa Black. And this is why people become doctors. A split second before her accident, she was just doing everything she wanted to do. And then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, her life is taken away from her. When you meet her, you know that she's going to be the type of person who's going to achieve what she sets out to do, because she is so optimistic.
LISA BLACK: I still fight with pain on a daily basis. But it's like I tell myself, I'm not going to sit on the sidelines. I'm going to get back in the game. And that's what I did.
I have partnered with MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. And I am working with them, speaking against drunk driving. I share my story with the police officers to try to encourage them to get out there and get these people off the roads. Looking back on it, I think, what a blessing that this hospital is right here in my backyard.
Conditions & Services
- Bone fracture
- Bone health services
- Compartment syndrome
- Dislocations
- Floating shoulder
- Neck fracture
- Tendon tears
On the Road Again
Barry's lower extremities were crushed in a motorcycle accident. One orthopedic trauma surgeon helped him get on the road again.
Barry Meek: Because I work inside most of the time, I like to spend my free time outdoors as much as possible. I fish, I fly-fish, hike. And among the things that I really enjoy is that I'm a motorcyclist.
It was a beautiful April Sunday afternoon. We were just north of the Lexington area on the Parkway when a vehicle crossed the center line and hit us. I remember the collision. Motorcycle was on top of me. I'm conscious. I was alive and I'm here. I could visibly see that I had some significant trauma. My left arm, it was opened up from my wrist to my elbow. My jeans were split, significant injury to my knee. My boot had been essentially ripped off.
I could tell that I had significant injury to that foot, but obviously didn't really know the nature.
David Weiss, MD: When I first saw Barry, he had been admitted to the hospital after a motorcycle accident. And because you don't have a lot of protection on a motorcycle, if you hit something like a guardrail or another car or the ground, there will often be some fairly significant injuries to the lower extremities.
And so he had a lot of bad injuries to his left foot. And so most of the work that we did after the first few weeks was really getting that foot back in shape and kind of put back together.
Barry Meek: From the very early stage, Dr. Weiss explained that it was going to be a process.
Weiss: We had to take some initial steps to kind of put the bones that were out of place back in place. But we couldn't do the type of long-term surgery he needed right away. So we did some temporary surgeries, and then going back in once the swelling had gone down and starting to actually reconstruct things with plates and screws and doing more what we call internal fixation.
Barry Meek: You don't have a particular relationship with an orthopedic trauma surgeon before the trauma. And so it's not as if I was wheeled into the University of Virginia and said, oh, I'd really like to have Dr. Weiss perform the surgery. I was introduced to him through circumstance. But I found him to be extraordinarily compassionate and interested in my goals in recovery.
I remember one of the first questions he asked me was, What do you want to do? And I said, First, I want to be able to ride a motorcycle again, and second, I want to be able to put that foot-- which at the time was pretty swollen-- I want to be able to get that foot back into a Western boot, and I'd like to go fishing again. And he said, I think we can make that happen.
Weiss: Barry's recovery was outstanding. He certainly had some difficult injuries to his foot, and it took some time to get them reconstructed. But he really progressed well with the therapy, and he had set his goals of getting back on the motorcycle, and I would say that he's accomplished that in spades.
Barry Meek: Within six months I was back on a bike. I've been riding all over the country. I've taken some very long trips. And I've seen some wonderful things from the saddle of a motorcycle.