Shane: Hip Surgery for Staph Infection

Описание: At hockey camp, Shane's hip started to hurt and rapidly worsened. His doctor sent Shane to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Nashua for a consultation and tests first thing the next day.

"We didn't know what was wrong," Kelly said. "We were thinking a pulled hip or something."

The stabbing pains turned out to be a staph infection in the hip joint.

Pediatric orthopaedist Dr. Kenneth Weintraub said Shane needed surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. "I thought, 'OK, well, I'll call, make the appointment tonight, and we'll go later,'" Kelly said. "He said, 'No, you need to go now. They're waiting.'"

Shane could not walk into the hospital and was in excruciating pain. Kelly wheeled him in, terribly upset. "There was a young man who works in admissions who was standing there and he said, 'This must be Shane.' I immediately felt, like, a calmness."

Dr. P. Christopher Cook, Shane's surgeon, met the family and laid out the team's plan of attack.

"Dr. Cook and everybody up there was just great about explaining to us a) what he had and b) what they were going to do about it and what the recovery was going to be like. So the whole process from getting him from camp to getting him to Lebanon was a whirlwind, but it was just seamless from our end."

Because Shane's bones were still growing, his doctors had to be sure the infection would be completely removed. Intensive IV drugs would not be enough. Surgeons cleaned out his hip joint by hand, giving his bones the best chances for normal development and recovery.

Shane saw his parents in post-op. "He immediately said he felt better," Sean said.

Shane's care was not finished, however. Two weeks of intravenous drugs cleared the staph infection from his bloodstream, and he needed followup appointments. Luckily for his family, who live in Merrimack, they did not have to make the journey back to Lebanon each time. Shane went to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Manchester.

"Having Shane's post-op care be in Manchester was huge for us," Sean said. "The flexibility of having a Manchester location twenty minutes from the house was great for us."

They could even see the same doctor. Dr. Cook, the surgeon who operated on Shane, had weekly office hours in Manchester.

"It's amazing to think that a child presents here in Nashua and even though we're spread apart by miles, the community group practices and DHMC are actually very tightly connected," said Daniel Abbis, Shane's radiologist. "The patient really benefits from that close connection that we have."

"I'm so happy that I got better, 'cause now I can play hockey, lacrosse, swimming and basically everything," Shane said.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Community Group Practices are in Concord, Manchester, Nashua and Keene, N.H.

In Nashua, a 140,000-square-foot facility will open in January 2012, bringing together services currently at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Nashua East, West, and Squires Centers, while also allowing for expanded specialty offerings in the region.

For more on the new facility, visit http://bit.ly/dh_nashuax8.

To learn more about Children's Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, visit http://chad.dartmouth-hitchcock.org/.