Enabling a child who is physically disabled to participate in a sport they love is the quickest way to restore their damaged self-esteem. For a child who has either lost a leg or who was born without one, running may be the key to such restoration. Since insurance only covers what is required for ambulation, it is up to the parents or other private sources to provide the adaptive equipment necessary for a child to have an opportunity to run.

Osteosarcoma is rare, yet it’s the most common form of bone cancer among children. It is an aggressive cancer, and removal of the diseased bone must be done quickly. The most common location for osteosarcoma is in the knee, and the surgical options for treatment of such an instance include limb salvage, where the diseased bone is replaced with a metal implant, a replacement bone from a cadaver, a transplanted live bone from a donor or a rotationplasty.

I have been an above-knee amputee for over 50 years. For the first 30 years, my prosthesis was balsa wood with a simple mechanical knee. I fell a lot, could only walk at one fixed speed, would sweat through a shirt going from car to plane, walked downstairs or the ramp to the plane in abject fear of falling and had the classic limping gait of an amputee. I knew nothing else and certainly did not imagine all of those things would be solved through the application of microprocessor technology.

Out of the U.S. population of 332 million, 2.1 million are amputees. Of those, 65% are leg amputees. My focus in this article is leg amputees. The traditional prosthetic legs I grew up with were purely mechanical and required the knee to be perfectly straight as the heel comes forward and begins to press down on the ground in front of you to lock. But if the heel comes down on an extension cord, a crack in the sidewalk or a child’s marble, the knee is not straight when pressure is put on it, so it does not lock and it collapses rapidly and you fall.

CNN CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR:
Waking up to realize you suddenly have no leg or legs is as horrible an experience as one can have, and one that will, sadly, be faced by a number of people injured in the bombing of the Boston Marathon. It happened to me when I was 16 after a bone cancer diagnosis and amputation (the cancer later spread to my lung and caused a lung to be removed as well).