Getting a leg up

Gene Johnson wears his battle scars proudly, scars in his battle to keep on his feet. After multiple surgeries, Johnson finally had surgery last month to replace his femur with a titanium version. Only 100 such surgeries are performed in the United States every year. (BCR photo/Barb Kromphardt)

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PRINCETON — For most people, the human leg is made of bone and muscle and sinew.

For Gene Johnson, he’s got the muscle and sinew, but the bone has been replaced by titanium, also known for its use in jet engines, missiles and spacecraft.

For Johnson, now 81, it all started back in 1995.

Johnson, a Walnut High School graduate, had taught and coached at Walnut in the 1950s before hitting the road as a salesman. At the end of his career, he came back to Bureau County to retire around 1995.

About that time, Johnson had his left hip replaced, followed by replacement surgery on his right hip in 1998.

The left hip was fine, but the right hip was a different matter, and Johnson had the surgery repeated the following year. It held for a few years, but earlier this year, Johnson was back under the knife.

“That pin was coming loose that goes down into your femur bone,” he said. “But before I got off the operating table, my whole bone cracked.”

Johnson’s doctor went back in and fastened a bar to the femur, or thigh bone, with screws and wires.

But that didn’t work, either.

“When I got ready to go back to rehab, it pulled all the screws out, and the bone was drawn like this,” Johnson said, making a curved motion with his hand.

So in June, Johnson went to Dr. Henry Finn, chief of orthopedic surgery at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

“They say Dr. Finn is the guy you need to go to when everything else fails,” Johnson said.

Dr. Finn operated on Johnson’s leg three days later.

“They put a bar here, in the front, and a bar down the side,” he said. “They got 20 screws in it and 20 wires wrapped around to hold it.”

But it didn’t last for long.

“The whole thing bent again,” Johnson said. “The bone came apart from the bar, and I fell in the Wal-Mart parking lot. I was flat on my back because the bone couldn’t hold me.”

Back to Chicago.

“This time, they took it all out,” Johnson said. “The ball, the bone and the knee are all gone, and they put titanium in there and put me back together.”

In October, Dr. Finn performed a total femur replacement on Johnson, which involved replacing the original thigh bone with a metal one, a procedure that’s performed only about 100 times nationwide each year.

“We generally don’t like to take out of the body what God gave us and put in something artificial,” Finn said in a press release. “But there’s a point when the bone and soft tissues won’t heal; so the only reasonable option was to remove the entire femur and replace it with metal.”

Johnson said the problem was basically old bones.

“Bones kind of wash out,” he said. “They get brittle. They get fragile over the years, and that’s what’s been happening to me.”

Johnson has returned home and is now having physical therapy at his house and doing his exercises faithfully.

“After the first surgery, I was very frustrated, but then I just kind of took the attitude, I gotta do what it takes to get it done,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to have to go back for another one.”

Johnson is especially motivated to get back to the gym and track and field, anywhere he needs to go to watch his Bureau Valley Storm teams compete.

“I’m a very physical, active spectator,” he said with a laugh.

Johnson said that things are going well with his recovery, and he’s determined to get back to as close to normal as possible.

“If everything goes right, they tell me I can able to get up and walk away,” Johnson said. “We’ll find out.”

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