 RI
Soccer Mom is Back in the Game
Cartilage injuries don't have to keep athletic patients on the
sidelines. Until recently, the best that could be done for patients with
severely damaged cartilage was to try to rebuild the knee. "We could
drill holes in the bone and hope new cartilage would form," says
University Orthopedics' Paul Fadale, MD. "The patient would usually
get better at first, but the risk of arthritis and future knee damage was
high." In April 1999, Fadale performed a relatively new procedure,
transplanting a patient's own cartilage.
His patient, Helen Paradise, 41, had been living in pain for four
years, after colliding with an opponent on the soccer field. Four hundred
pounds of force had torn her anterior cruciate ligament, which helps
stabilize the knee, and ripped a section from the Teflon-like cartilage
that covered the end of her thigh bone.
Fadale reconstructed the ligament
in October 1995, but, at the time, there was no procedure to repair the
cartilage, which hung loosely within the joint, sometimes even jamming it.
Paradise tried everything—pain medications, braces, physical therapy—and even weighed the pros and cons of knee replacement surgery. Then came
news of the promising new procedure.
The procedure 
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