Harris's Story
From a Terrifying Accident, a Promising Recovery
“We’d just returned from a nice snowmobile ride in the woods near our camp in Canaan, Vermont,” recalls Keith. “It started snowing like a banshee so we decided to come back early and prepare for the next day. I was backing the sleds into the barn for our ride the next morning just like I’ve done a hundred times.”
It’s a thought that readily comes to mind for Keith and Kelly Jones when they think back to the horrible accident of January 18, 2009, the life-threatening injury to their son Harris and the set of events that would follow.
But as Kelly’s Ski-Doo GXS 500 hit the barn floor, it stopped abruptly, causing Keith to pitch forward against the throttle. Revving to 9,000 RPMs, the machine launched itself wildly into the barn, throwing Keith against the wall and knocking Kelly onto a workbench before it landed on 2-1/2-year-old Harris. “He was sitting on some nearby stairs,” says Keith. “If he’d been sitting any lower, he would have been killed.”
Instead, the machine’s studded track ripped through Harris’ right leg with sickening force. “His leg was just shredded from knee to foot like it had gone through a meat grinder,” says Keith. As Kelly ran into the house to call 911, Keith knew enough from his first aid training as a football coach to keep pressure on Harris’ femoral artery. “I was afraid he was going to bleed to death in front of me, but it was so cold in the barn (4 degrees Fahrenheit), my hands started freezing to his leg. I think that helped to slow the bleeding.”
EMTs were on the scene in less than 12 minutes. “We were told later that the Beecher Falls Fire Department and the emergency room staff at Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital in Colebrook did a fantastic job stabilizing Harris and keeping his leg viable for the three-hour transport by ambulance to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon,” says Kelly.
Upon arrival, Harris was rushed into Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Emergency Department for surgery. Orthopaedic surgeon John-Erik Bell, MD, on call that holiday weekend, provided critical wound and trauma care to Harris’ leg, re-attaching his patella tendon and stabilizing the injury with an external fixator.
“We soon learned that there was a 50-50 chance that Harris could lose his leg,” says Keith. “The machine had ripped a chunk of his tibia out and broken the bone in two places, the worse being at the bottom growth plate near his ankle. But the bigger concerns at the time were the soft tissue damage and risk of infection. Few believed that Christopher Cook, MD, who took over Harris’ case the next morning, could save his flesh.”
But Cook, an experienced pediatric orthopaedic surgeon, knew the power of patience in treating children. “Initially, it was thought that one of the nerves to the foot had been severed; but as we got things cleaned up, and we explored more, we found that it was completely intact and not damaged,” Cook recalls. “Another concern was, ‘Does the skin that was peeled off around his leg have enough blood supply to survive?’ If he had been an adult, probably not. But a child’s ability to recover can be quite astounding. The key is to keep cleaning the area and taking out the dead tissue so that it doesn’t get infected.”
Over the course of several weeks, Cook painstakingly performed many of these “cleanouts” and dressing changes, employing the VAC (vacuum-assisted closure) technique, a system for applying negative pressure to wounds to speed healing. Gradually, he closed the leg using Harris’ recovered skin—along with two skin graft procedures done by plastic surgeon Kenneth Leong, MD—without any infection occurring.
In the months that followed, Harris showed steady progress and his external fixator was replaced by a series of plaster casts. “Mother’s Day was really special for me,” says Kelly. “We took Harris to the Portland Children’s Museum in Maine; and even though he had a cast on, he was back being my little two-year-old, running around and having a blast.”
“The level of care we’ve received at CHaD (Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth) has been phenomenal, and the staff have been so accommodating—it’s become like a second home to us,” she says. “And the outpouring of support that we’ve received from our home community of Milford and so many other communities across the state has been incredible. It’s meant the world to our family.”
In September, Cook performed a second surgery on Harris to begin addressing the longer-term issues of strengthening his tibia and getting his leg to grow properly. “We straightened his leg, did a bone graft to fill in the defect, and placed an external fixator for support,” he explains. “I think because he’s so young, he will regenerate his tibia. The growth plate around his knee seems to be fine, but the growth plate down by his ankle is not. This may cause recurrent issues with angular deformity and leg-length discrepancy, which we may need to address from time to time over his childhood.”
“That’s the scary part about all of this now,” says Keith. “It could go on for years; and if his leg doesn’t grow, there is still a possibility that he could lose it. If he ends up needing a prosthetic down the road, at least we can say that we did everything we could for him. But a lot of positive things have happened so far. What Dr. Cook has done for Harris is amazing—having him in our corner gives us hope.”
