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The tugboat worker whose leg was torn apart in an accident and badly infected by the oily water. There were construction workers who had fallen from on high. He was the surgeon for patients with bones so shattered that other doctors could not repair them. Florida Hospital Altamonte shipped me off to Florida Hospital South, where I expected Cole would be operating on me the next morning.īetween now and the time I first saw him in 1989, Cole had become a boneyard legend. Assisting Cole in this procedure is surgical scrub technician, Brian Barrera. The first was four years prior and involved a somersault over the handlebars that broke six ribs, a collar bone, punctured a lung and dislocated my shoulder.Īs before, Seminole County firefighters came to the rescue.Ĭole (left) is a boneyard legend and often the surgeon of last resort for patients with extremely severe injuries. It was only when I quit for the sake of safety that the ER trips began. I never had a serious crash in all my years of bike racing. My bike reared like a horse coming across a rattlesnake and I got tossed. An earlier drizzle left the trail slick, and the tires lost their grip. We were coming down an overpass, when I let off the brakes and picked up speed, oblivious to the sharp left turn ahead. He arrived only a few months earlier from Houston, where he worked at one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation.Īnd I thought to myself, “If I ever break a bone, I’m going to that guy.”Ībout 25 years later, I was lying prone on the Cross Seminole Trail, my bike on one side and my friend calling the ambulance on the other. His name was Dean Cole, a hotshot trauma specialist the likes of which the hospital had never seen. He worked all night and into the morning. This surgeon was, in essence, building a ship in a bottle. The scar extended from his hip to his knee. I recalled when my brother badly broke his femur in a motorcycle accident in the 1970s. He was lining the bones up for the hardware that would hold them in place. The surgeon referred to it constantly as he inserted instruments into and out of a small incision. It displayed X-ray images of his broken femur. There wasn’t any of the music or banter I heard in other operating rooms.Ī screen was next to the patient. The doc in charge didn’t seem much older than the residents.

The patient was buried under coverings, only the wounded areas left exposed for scalpel access. The bedlam of the emergency room soon gave way to the calm and quiet of the operating room. This was my first look at the controlled chaos of trauma. I was with them day and night, going to doctors’ meetings, going on rounds, observing surgeries ranging from hip replacements to shoulder repairs to knee arthroscopes.

The subjects of the story were two orthopedic residents. I was in the background with my reporter’s notebook, on assignment for Florida magazine, which was delivered with the Sunday edition of the Orlando Sentinel. So was his forearm.ĭoctors and nurses rushed about the Orlando Regional Medical Center emergency room, issuing orders, wheeling in equipment, assessing damage, setting up X-rays. The patient was not wearing a seatbelt when the crash occurred. An orthopedic surgeon who specializes in difficult cases, Cole says he’ll be a surgeon “until I die.” Photo by Rafael Tongol Dean Cole’s greatest fear in life seems to be wasting any of it.

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