The injured soldier, a patient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, was unforgettable. “He was a special forces guy, in the middle of a firefight,” his physician Leon Nesti recalls. “His leg was blown off above the knee. In the middle of this firefight, he picked up his leg and used it to stabilize his weapon, and kept firing at the enemy.”
When the soldier arrived at Walter Reed about 4 years ago, Nesti says they had to take him to the operating room every couple of days to clean the wounds and remove damaged muscle tissue. Finally, he was fitted for a prosthetic.
But about a month later, his prosthetic became painful. The soft tissue that attached to the device had turned hard and stiff. He had developed a disorder known as heterotopic ossification, where bone begins to grow in areas where there should be muscle.
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