Amputations

Los Angeles has one of the highest diabetes-related amputation rates in the country. Yet vascular surgeon Dr. George Andros can't seem to draw enough attention to the problem, which has skyrocketed not just here but nationally. "It's not sexy," he acknowledges. "Who cares about diabetic feet? It has no sizzle." Over the last 15 years, the U.S. rate of foot amputations from complications of diabetes has soared, approaching 100,000 annually, according to studies and government statistics.

A zoo worker had his forearm reattached after his colleagues recovered the severed limb from the mouth of a Nile crocodile. The crocodile severed Chang Po-yu's forearm at the Shou Shan Zoo in Kaohsiung when the veterinarian tried to retrieve a tranquilizer dart from the reptile's hide, zoo officials said. The 17-year-old reptile is one of a pair of Nile crocodiles kept by the zoo. Officials said the zoo got the reptile from an area resident, who had kept it as a pet.

Kellie Lim knows all too well what it is like to be a very sick child. Struck with a ravaging bacterial infection that destroys limbs, she became a triple amputee at age 8 and soon faced a life of prosthetics, wheelchairs and often-painful rehabilitation. But from that suffering, Lim forged a life of achievement. On Friday, she will graduate from UCLA's medical school and then will begin a residency program at the medical center there. Her chosen specialty?

The waiting room in William Yule's office is full by the time he arrives each morning. Throughout the day, Yule sees dozens of patients, bouncing between four sparsely decorated examining rooms on such a tight schedule that he often has no time for lunch. But Yule is no doctor. He's a prosthetist who fits limbs on recent amputees, and business is booming for one reason: diabetes. "There's no such thing as a slow day," says Yule, of Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics Inc.

A man whose amputated, embalmed leg was sold at an auction will get the limb back despite objections from the buyer, who wanted to include it in a macabre, money-making Halloween display, police said Thursday. The dispute over the leg John Wood lost in an airplane crash three years ago was resolved when police decided the buyer, Shannon Whisnant, had given up ownership by initially calling authorities and asking them to take it away.

SAN DIEGO -- Marine Sgt. Jordan Pierson, who lost his left leg to a roadside bomb in Ramadi, Iraq, had a request for the therapists at the Naval Medical Center here. He wanted a prosthetic leg that would let him play golf like he did before his injury. "I'm huge into golf," he said Friday. "So they made me an ankle that will allow me to follow through."

Columnist and novelist Art Buchwald is in a Washington-area hospice after having part of his leg amputated, his assistant said Thursday. Cathy Crary said the leg was amputated below the knee because it wasn't getting enough blood because of a vascular condition. The 80-year-old Buchwald also has a kidney problem, she said, but wasn't undergoing dialysis. "He's really doing very well," Crary said.

In the history of war, the more proficient combatants have become at fighting, the better medicine has become at healing. During World War II, battlefield doctors devised better techniques to repair delicate blood vessels, essentially rewriting the textbooks on vascular surgery. The Vietnam War sparked swift helicopter evacuation of the wounded that was soon copied by urban medical centers throughout the United States.

Beyond the wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of the other 1.28 million U.S. citizens who are amputees could also benefit from newer high-tech prostheses, health and insurance experts say. But they might not get them.

Bryan Anderson emerged from an elevator in the airport terminal here, a diminished figure in a wheelchair. Both legs were gone, and most of his left arm -- all severed when a roadside bomb hidden in a curb demolished the Humvee he was driving in Baghdad last fall. Anderson was never a big man -- 5 feet 6, 125 pounds.