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VOLUME 21, NUMBER 25
JUNE 28, 1974
DURHAM. NORTH CAROLINA
Surgeons Save Severed Thumb
Fayetteville Youth Makes
Medical History at Duke
When Paul Stewart decided to go
water skiing on Saturday, June 1, he had
no idea he would make medical history.
Paul lost his thumb at 11:30 a.m.
that day, and it wasn't until 5 o'clock the
next morning that it was back in its
proper place on his right hand.
He has his brother, his father and a
team of orthopaedic surgeons at the
medical center to thank for the happy
reunion.
It all began shortly before lunch that
Saturday on the choppy waters of White
Lake near Elizabethtown, N.C. while
Paul, his brothers and several friends were
pursuing a favorite pastime.
The other fellows skied without
incident, but when Paul took his turn, a
coil in the tow rope looped around his
thumb and ripped it off at the base.
His companions rushed the 17-year-old
to an Elizabethtown hospital and
telephoned his father. Dr. Albert S.
Stewart Jr. of Fayetteville.
The physician, a specialist in internal
medicine, knew that with modern surgical
techniques it is sometimes possible to
re-attach limbs which have been severed
in accidents.
He also knew that this complex
micro-surgery is often attempted at Duke,
that Fort Bragg provides an emergency
helicopter air lift service and that time is
a critical factor if replantation is to be
successful.
Unfortunately, Paul's thumb lay
somewhere on the bottom of White Lake.
. Remaining calm, the internist asked
his 18-year-old son David to collect as
many of his friends as possible and hurry
back to the lake to look for the missing
thumb.
Using face masks, David and six others
dived repeatedly in the rough water at the
site of the accident. A boatload of
disbelieving onlookers was enlisted to
keep additional boats out of the area.
"We had to keep trying even though I
didn't think there was much chance of
finding it," David said.
Fortune smiled on their efforts.
"I saw it lying in eight feet of water
about 20 feet from where I was
swimming," the brother said. "Luckily,
the bottom was sand instead of mud."
An army helicopter flew Paul and his
thumb, now packed in ice, to Duke
Hospital, arriving at 6:30 p.m. Within an
hour. Dr. James Urbaniak, associate
professor of orthopaedic surgery, and
the hospital's Orthopaedic Replantation
Team were reattaching the thumb to the
young man's hand with the aid of a 40
power triple-headed microscope.
Urbaniak and his highly specialized
team, composed of Drs. Panayotis
Soucacos, Don Bright and Robert
Adelaar, have been functioning for nearly
two years, and although they have done
20 similar operations, this was the first to
be attempted more than six hours after
an accident.
Urbaniak said he and his associates
(Continued on page 3)
'THUMBS UP'ON A
SUCCESSFUL
OPERA r/O/V-Paul
Stewart (left) and
his brother David of
Fayetteville, N.C.,
compare thumbs 10
days after Paul's was
severed in a water
skiing accident.
David, after rushing
his brother to a
hospital in
Elizabethtown, N.C.,
returned to the lake
where the mishap
occurred and found
the missing digit on
the bottom of the
lake where it had
lain for two hours.
Surgeons at the
hospital were
successful in
reuniting Paul and
h is thumb. (Photo
by David
Williamson)
\
Summer Arts Festival
U.S.S.R.-U.S.A. Meet Set
For July 4th Weekend
"The Russians are coming! The
Russians are coming!"
"Relax there, Paul Revere. Give that
poor old horse of yours a break. Haven't
you heard? They're coming all right, but
it's fqr a track meet and arts festive."
"To Durham?" The old silversmith
looked skeptical and scratched his wig.
"You'd better believe it. And it's going
to be held Independence Day weekend,
July 4-7, in and around Wallace Wade
Stadium at Duke University, if you know
where that is."
"Why would the nation's most
prestigious track and field event—outside
of the Olympic or Pan-American
Games—come to Durham, North
Carolina, after playing five years at such
sites as Los Angeles and Philadelphia
where interest in the sport is supposedly
greater than anywhere else?" he asked.
According to Dr. LeRoy T. Walker,
coordinator for the USSR-USA
International Track and Field Meet, the
answer is simple and logical.
"Our success with the Pan-African
Games (1971) and the Martin Luther
King Games (1973) demonstrated that we
could do the job and that the Triangle
Area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) will
support top-flight track," he said.
"When we put in Durham's bid for the
Russian-American meet, we were
competing against some real track
towns," explained Walker, chairman of
the Department of Physical Education
and Recreation at N.C. Central University
here. "But we had some very impressive
statistics behind us."
For starters there was the Pan-African
event, which drew a crowd of 52,000 to
see the first team ever assembled from the
entire African continent. The two-day
attendance was the largest in the Western
Hemisphere for the past decade.
"Then we showed our first success was
no fluke when we staged the King Games
two years later," said Walker, adding that
an enthusiastic crowd of 23,000 track
fans were on hand for the competition.
Al Buehler, Duke's cross country and
track coach and former president of the
U.S. Track Coaches Association who has
the job of coordinating the meet itself,'
pointed to the fine athletic facilities here
at the university as a reason for bringing
the event to Tobaccoland.
"We like to call our track the
'Firecracker 440' because of its fast
surface and red color," Buehler
explained, while describing Duke's new
all-weather ProTurf track, which was
partly responsible for many of the eleven
meet records during last year's King
Games.
And a 44,000 seating capacity and a
giant electronic scoreboard clock and
Duke's facility must be considered one of
the most outstanding in the United
States, he indicated.
Mrs. Revere looked disgruntled and
began polishing the silverware.
"What about me?" she asked. "Paul is
a frustrated athlete and a frustrated
jockey—that's why he likes to chase
(Continued on page 3)