Ordeal & Triumph

Into the sun parlor of Atlanta's Emory University Hospital hobbled a solidly built man, taking some of the weight off his artificial left foot with a cane. Doctors, nurses and other well-wishers burst into applause as he completed the ten-yard walk from his room. Charles C. Kilpatrick, 42, warned with a grin: "Not too loud or you'll knock me over." Unaided, he eased himself into a chair, propped his feet on another. Charlie Kilpatrick was going home to his wife and teenage son, after three years and four months in the hospital and 50 operations to repair the damage caused in an accident that few expected him to survive.

One February day in 1955, Charles Kilpatrick, who worked for Georgia Power Co., was holding a surveyor's rod in the fenced enclosure of one of the company's substations outside Atlanta. Somehow, the rod touched a live wire carrying 11,000 volts. Kilpatrick was savagely burned and lost consciousness. Doctors at the Emory hospital doubted that he would live and it was touch and go for weeks. With third-degree burns penetrating to the bones of his lower left leg and right foot, Kilpatrick mercifully did not regain full consciousness for two weeks. By then, Surgeon William C. McGarity had already amputated his left leg below the knee. His right foot seemed likely to be lost. It was also doubtful whether he might ever regain the use of his right hand.

Triple Plays. Orthopedic Surgeon Robert Kelly Jr. took over. To get skin back onto Kilpatrick's right foot, he had to use pedicle grafts (TIME, April 8, 1957), with the skin flap left attached to its original site to maintain blood flow until it "took" at the new site. Obvious sources would have been Kilpatrick's left leg--the part that had had to be amputated. So Dr. Kelly had to try a triple play--from right thigh to left stump, later from there to the right foot. This kept Kilpatrick in a grotesquely distorted and uncomfortable position. And the flap died in the first stage. A second try, abdomen to wrist to foot, failed in the final stage. With his patient still game ("I hated, for Dr. Kelly's sake, to have those flaps go bad"), the surgeon tried again.

For seven weeks, Kilpatrick's right calf and left stump were joined. He could not move his lower limbs as much as a hundredth of an inch. He was anchored by weights and pins were inserted in the bone. Then for four weeks stump and foot were joined. The flap took. Kilpatrick could have saved himself great pain if he had simply asked the doctors to amputate the right foot. "But it's worth all this to a man," says Dr. Kelly, "to have a leg and be able to hobble."

Frogs' Legs Too. Equally tricky and time-consuming were 1) transplants of tendons from amputated legs of other patients to Kilpatrick's right hand and 2) rerouting of a major arm nerve below Kilpatrick's right shoulder. He had to have his arm splinted in a tight "V" at first, saw it gradually straightened over a period of nine months.

With Georgia Power footing the bills, Kilpatrick had round-the-clock private nurses. Carolyn Adkins, a veteran of 28 years at Emory, was with him for all but six weeks of his stay. When an artery burst in his stump, she had to apply a tourniquet all by herself, and it saved his life. To devoted Nurse Adkins it was not all drudgery. Charlie was a cooperative and appreciative patient, and she enjoyed varying his monotonous hospital meals with such delicacies as frogs' legs and shrimp. She fought to keep the sheets wrinkle-free to help save Kilpatrick from bed sores, pointed out pridefully: "His back is as smooth as a baby's."

After three years of helplessness, this week cheerful Charlie Kilpatrick is home doing exercises to tone up his disused muscles, expects to start a desk job at the power company on Aug. 1.

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