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Maggots help ex-soccer player get leg up on life
Former Sayre soccer player suffered terrible collision in senior season
By Jennifer Smith
jsmith3@herald-leader.com

When the maggots started to escape, Dylan Newton knew he'd had enough.

The Sayre High School soccer star had stoically tolerated many things in the previous three weeks: two broken bones in his leg, multiple surgeries and skin grafts, a wound vacuum attached to him constantly.

He'd lost track of what day it was because he'd been in a hospital bed for so long.

But the rogue medical maggots, rarely used on humans but helpful in his particular case, were the breaking point for Newton.

More than 800 of them were placed in an open incision in his leg to feast on his dead muscle tissue.

The doctor had built them a custom cage with a mesh cover. But after several days, the maggots ran out of food and started to depart the cage, irritating his healthy skin.

That's when he came undone from the terrible tickling, creepy, crawly sensation.

"I couldn't deal with it anymore," he said. "I'd been up all day long and all night long flipping out."

His parents, including his father, Chris, who uses maggots in his equine veterinary practice, sprang to action.

In the middle of the night, pajama-clad Chris and Carrie Newton aided by two nurses at Saint Joseph East, cleaned out hundreds of maggots from Dylan's leg.

"It's not exactly what you want to be doing in the middle of the night," Carrie Newton said.

"They were coming off the bed. You had to drown them in alcohol to kill them."

Being the middle of the night, any of the participants might have mistaken this for a bizarre nightmare.

But it was real.

They were all there as a result of a soccer field collision on Sept. 29, 2009, that would not only alter the rest of their year, but Dylan's life — in both good ways and bad.

Unimaginable injury

Before the nightmare, it had been a near-perfect senior season for Dylan at Sayre.

In 12 games, he had team bests of 12 goals and 14 assists. The Spartans, not always a soccer power in this soccer-rich city, were 7-2-5 and had advanced to the All "A" Cup in Frankfort.

Exactly a year ago Wednesday, the weather was a lot like it is now, starting to get cool, and the Spartans were at Tates Creek to play an important district game.

Dylan, who had spent the previous weeks visiting colleges where he planned to play soccer, raced toward a ball. He could see both the ball and the goal in front of him.

He took one step too far, one touch too long.

The Tates Creek goalkeeper was charging for the same ball at the same time, and his body crashed into Dylan's extended left leg.

Sayre Coach Joe Porter said it wasn't a dirty hit, just two players going after a 50-50 ball as hard and fast as they could.

But that hit left all 6-foot-3, 195 pounds of Dylan Newton on the Tates Creek turf.

He tried to pick his leg up, and it "just hung there," he remembered.

Newton, a laid-back, dry sort by nature, turned to his teammates around him and said: "Hey, guys, I think I broke my leg."

He wasn't sure because he couldn't feel it anymore.

His parents, who had attended Dylan's soccer games since he was barely older than a toddler, knew immediately something was wrong.

"It was surreal," Carrie said. "I've been watching him play soccer his whole life and never imagined anything like this could happen."

The ambulance arrived and took him to Saint Joseph East.

'Horrific' pain

A family friend, Dr. Gregory D'Angelo, met the Newtons at the hospital.

The sports medicine specialist told the family Dylan had a broken tibia and fibula. The next morning he placed a rod and four screws in the player's leg.

Carrie Newton wasn't worried. She told herself: "We're going to stick the rod in his leg, put some screws in there, then we'll take him home for some rehab for a few weeks and he'll be back up being Dylan."

Her time frame was a little off.

Dylan took a turn for the worse and was struck by blinding pain.

"He was comfortable, and we were thinking we'd send him home the next day, and when I came in to see him on Friday morning, he didn't look good," D'Angelo recalled. "The pain was evident. There was more swelling. I said this isn't right at this late stage."

Dylan had a complication called compartment syndrome. If it hadn't been caught when it was, he might have lost part of his leg.

"The statistics are not good for a late compartment syndrome decompression," D'Angelo said, noting there's close to a 50 percent amputation rate in those cases.

It's a complication most common in high-velocity fractures like from automobile accidents. The compartments that contain the muscle — described by one doctor as protective Saran Wrap — can handle no more swelling and the blood flow to that area gets cut off, killing the muscle and healthy tissue around it.

If too much muscle dies, so does use of the leg.

"It's just one of those dreaded complications," D'Angelo said. "It's something that can happen, but not frequently, thank goodness."

The only way to relieve the pressure is a fasciotomy, cutting open the muscle covering, which they did on both sides of Dylan's lower leg.

Dylan winces even months later as he describes the pain of trying to stand up after the procedure.

"All the blood rushed down there, and it felt like my skin was on fire, like it was being ripped apart," he said.

It took him three hours to get out of bed.

"The pain, hours upon hours of it, that you'd never want to watch your child go through," Carrie said. "There were just horrific episodes of pain."

Still unable to run

To save Dylan from having to undergo even more surgeries (he's had eight in all and probably will have two more in the next year or so), which might have also meant the loss of more healthy tissue in the leg, his father suggested using the maggots.

Dr. William O'Neill, who worked on Dylan's case, had used leeches plenty of times, but never maggots. He researched the procedure, consulted with other doctors, but none had experience with them.

Some hospitals around the country had used them, but this is the first instance here, he believes.

Even though the crawling and the creeping of the medical maggots took Dylan to the edge, they did their job and helped him heal.

[genlock]

Some local hospitals use maggot therapy.
Excess maggots are used in some process named "Tapioca".