Advanced surgery saves soldiers' legs

SAN FRANCISCO - A 2004 shooting and roadside bomb in Iraq left US Marine Sergeant Oscar Canon, 25, with a gaping hole in his thigh the size of a baseball - a wound that should have cost him his leg. Yet today he can walk and run again.

"In previous wars, this patient would have undergone an amputation," said Dr Amy Wandel, a plastic surgeon who operated on Canon at the US Navy Medical Centre in San Diego.

Dr Wandel said the amputation rate in the Iraq conflict was just 20 per cent, compared with 76 per cent during the Vietnam War, meaning thousands of limbs were saved.

Faster treatment and evacuation, as well as new plastic surgery techniques, "have allowed us to care for injuries that in previous wars would have resulted in the death of the patient or an amputation in the field", said Dr Wandel, who has just retired from the Navy.

"The biggest difference is that during the Vietnam and Korean wars, those injuries resulted in the amputation because we did not have the technology we have to reconstruct nerves, arteries and veins, and then close huge soft tissue wounds," she said.

"All of the work that we are now doing in the military will be able to translate into the civilian world to improve our care for patients, including from motor vehicle accidents," she added.

Sergeant Canon said he did not realise how seriously he had been hurt until he tried to stand up.

"Lying there I just saw my femur. I thought, this is not good."

The recovery process was gruelling, and he has undergone 58 operations since then.

"A lot of people don't realise that plastic surgery has such a big impact," he said.

Marine Sergeant Douglas Hayenga, 23, has undergone nearly two dozen operations, which included installing a plate as long as his tibia, followed by a bone graft. He walks with a cane, but no more surgery is planned for now.

Military doctors said most US injuries in Iraq were from explosive devices and shrapnel, with legs and arms vulnerable because they were not shielded by body armour.

The Pentagon said 20,687 in the US military had been wounded in Iraq as of last Friday.

- REUTERS