I was just living my life, you know,
avid outdoorsman and I was with the Marine Corps
and working and going to school,
trying to become a firefighter
and everything was just going as planned, nice and smoothly.
We've been dating for about four years
and we just got engaged
and we're planning our wedding for 2023.
One day it just started with a limp
and a little bit of pain.
I started limping and then it goes away
and then a couple weeks later it comes back
and I thought just a small strain.
We're in our 20s, we didn't think anything
this serious could be wrong with us.
So we started out at a primary doctor.
We were sent to an MRI.
They basically told him he had a muscle strain,
torn tendon, they told him he'd be fine,
but then things started getting worse
and so I had him go to Rush in Aurora at the ER
and after they viewed all his imaging, his CTs, MRI,
his x-ray, and then they also ran new MRI and CT.
I had reached out to a surgeon that did my hand surgery
and he had recommended us to Dr. Blank
and then when we went to Castle Orthopaedics,
they had also recommended us to Dr. Blank.
When I first met Kevin,
he came in with a significant amount of hip pain.
We got some imaging and we saw
that there was some sort of a mass in his hip area
and biopsy showed it was, unfortunately, a Ewing's sarcoma,
which is a type of cancer.
My reaction, it wasn't really something that hit me hard.
Oh, I cried.
I cried for like two months.
Soon as it hit me, I'm like, "All right, let's get going.
When's the first chemo?"
And I think that's what really helped him
throughout this whole process was him being so positive
and not looking down on his situation.
So Dr. Blank pretty much recommended me to Dr. Mittal,
the pediatric oncologist who would be taking care of me.
The first goal is to try to shrink the tumor
to make the job of the surgeon easier,
which would involve upfront chemotherapy for about 12 weeks,
after which there would be consideration
of whether we want to do surgery versus radiation
because Ewing's sarcoma is also sensitive to radiation.
Ewing's sarcomas in general are very rare diagnoses,
only a few hundred of them every year in the United States.
Additionally, having it in this location is quite rare
so it makes it a challenging problem
of how do we deal with the cancer in the hip surgically?
There have been a number of procedures tried before
throughout the country and the world
to remove these tumors and reconstruct
or rebuild the hip that has to be removed with the tumor.
Many of those procedures have high complication rates.
Here at Rush, we've been performing
3D printed pelvic reconstructions with 3D printed implants
and we've been doing them quite successfully
for a few years now and we believed
that Kevin was a very good candidate for this.
We can actually 3D print a perfect match
of basically a new pelvis made out of metal
that can then be implanted in that same exact spot.
I think 3D printing is not only the future,
it's the present.
Many fields in orthopedics as well as cancer
are really utilizing 3D printing technology.
After all the discussion and the review,
I think our team was fairly confident
that with this new approach that Dr. Blank was using
he would be able to get rid of
the remaining tumor after chemotherapy
and then also give him an excellent chance of function.
By doing the surgery,
because it was localized and not metastatic,
they were taking out the bone that included the cancer
and the cancer in the soft tissues
so they were removing it completely from his body.
The surgery takes anywhere from 6 1/2 to 9 hours in total
and it involves three or four different surgeons
and really a significant planned effort.
Many of us spend hours
for the few weeks running up before the surgery,
we go through our technique
to make sure we're all on the same page
and it's really a multidisciplinary team effort
to get it done.