Halyna Chupylko, a 68-year-old woman from Lviv, fell from a ladder while picking cherries. The woman suffered a severe and atypical injury due to a concomitant illness, and could have lost the ability to move fully forever.
To prevent this, orthopedic trauma surgeons at St Luke’s Hospital of the First Medical Association performed a complex combined operation.
On 15 June, the patient and her husband went cherry picking. The woman was on a ladder, and her husband was watching from below. At some point, Halyna grabbed a branch, and it snapped. She landed on her left foot, right on the heel. The husband immediately took his wife to the emergency room of St Luke’s Hospital.
Doctors examined the patient and found she had a combined ankle injury. The Achilles tendon had been torn off from its attachment point, and a piece of the heel bone had broken off at the same time. And another bone in the foot, the so-called medial bone, turned its sharp edges towards the skin and cut into the soft tissue, causing Halyna severe pain.
“The height from which the patient fell was not high. But the woman has osteoporosis, a disease that makes her bones fragile. That is why the injury turned out to be much more complicated than it would have been for a person whose bones were not affected by osteoporosis,” says Yuriy Senyuk, an orthopaedic traumatologist at the hospital, about the patient’s complicated history.
An hour and a half after Halyna’s fall, her injured leg in the ankle area swelled up severely, doubling in size. And the skin began to develop flickers – blisters filled with tissue fluid. There was a threat of necrosis, so the operation had to be performed immediately.
During a complex combined intervention, the orthopedic traumatologists first dealt with the swelling: by cutting the skin, they released the tissue from excessive pressure. And then they started working on the Achilles tendon, connecting the broken bone fragment with the main body of the heel. They also returned another bone to its correct position. Thus, the doctors were able to fully restore the anatomical structure of the injured area. Without this urgent intervention, the patient could have lost the supporting function of her leg forever.
Today, the woman is gradually recovering and dreams of returning to her household chores as soon as possible. However, recovery from such an injury is long and takes about 3-4 months.