Recording – 08-01-2024 07:19:50

00:02 This is Mark Swiontkowski recording at the annual meeting of the 20th Century Orthopedic Association. And we are here at Lake Geneva at the Grand Geneva Resort, I believe is the name. And we're on the first day of the meeting, and it's my honor to be interviewing Dr. Amy Ladd, hand surgeon extraordinaire, researcher, clinician, who is at Stanford. And we are here to discuss our dear departed friend and mentor, Dr. Ken De Haven. And Dr. Ladd has a lengthy history with Kenny, as I used to call him. And she's going to share with us her recollections of a great friend and surgeon. So, Amy, it's all you.

00:52 So, yeah, we lost Ken three years ago. I knew him or got to know of him when I was in high school. I grew up in Rochester, New York, one of the suburbs. And he was famous then. He was a famous sports surgeon. And this is in the mid-70s, when what is a famous sports surgeon? Not like today. My brother was a gifted golfer and had a wrist ganglion, and he got to see the great Ken DeHaven But I was honored with a Dartmouth, Rochester area Dartmouth scholarship, and he was present at the time. So that's. I was like, oh, my God, this is great. And there weren't many women. I was the third class of women at Dartmouth. So there was an exceptional bond because he had gone there and fast forward. I got to know him really well as his patient because I was a long distance runner and had compartment syndromes. And I was a medical student at Syracuse and came under his auspices because the guys at Syracuse said, no, you don't have that. And I said, I know I have that. And he believed me and put me on a regimen, ultimately had surgery and had a bunch of surgeries. But that was just like, this is a caring human being. And that, in a way, is. I mean, there's so many legacies of Ken as we call him. He was for the common athlete, the common person, the weekend warrior, the high school aspirant. He didn't like fame, he didn't like the spotlight. He liked principled ways of approaching things, whether you were as patient or ultimately, as his resident and great mentor. He approached, you know, come from that Midwestern outside of Dayton, Ohio, where he's from. Just salt of the earth, methodical, principled thinking to carry you through complex problems. He would kind of dissect as principled ways to approach him. There's so many things. When things went awry, it was cattywampus. I love that expression there's a million.

03:11 Ways to say it and spell it.

03:12 But I say it the way he did, but probably, and I knew this when I was a medical student, what he became, well, what he became famous for was meniscal repair.

03:26 Right.

03:27 And he was a big fan of patellar tendon autographs. Very methodical. We could do those in our sleep. But he became most famous for his diagnostic acumen and non operative management. And one of the things that was so simple that he discovered that if you aspirate a knee, a swollen knee and it has blood, it has a 95% chance of being an ACL tear. Proved this without an MRI. Proved it ultimately with surgery. But he published this in a family practice journal. That's just kind of his embrace. He was a mentor to so many and he wanted to get it out of how you diagnose, how you treat from the kind of the whole ecosystem, if you will, of musculoskeletal care.

04:12 Right. Yeah. And I happen to know that Ken could have been a professional football player. And if memory serves, he was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and elected to give up on that. And because he was a great football player, could have gone to Ohio State, but went to Dartmouth and went into medicine because he could help more people. And that's just part of the theme that you've already established is he was about helping people.

04:45 And there's a touching story which I didn't know until later. He was a three season athlete, was track, football and basketball. And I think his potential scholarship at Ohio State was for two sports. I don't think it was his football. And then he ended up playing offense and defense at Dartmouth, was kept in the team, but he was fueled by medicine because he had an older brother who ultimately died of leukemia and his father had head and neck cancer. So he saw up close the sadness, the turmoil and the what can I do to change this scope? And so I think that he was one of those people. Again, back to his principled nature that was fueled by a drive to help the person. Not just the knee or the hip.

05:42 Right. The whole individual.

05:44 Yeah.

05:45 Such a thoughtful and kind. I think you've used that word twice already and I would use it 10 times more. I haven't met too many people in our field that are anywhere near Kenny's league. As far as kindness goes, just with everybody, the famous and as you mentioned earlier, the not famous, just a gentle nature, thoughtful first response, always to listen rather than to talk. And an inspiration. He's. Who are some of the other people that he influenced in their career as much as he did you.

06:26 Yeah. So, you know, well, so I went into hand surgery. Everybody assumed I was going to go into sports because I was identified so closely with him and his methodology or aspire to. But so he had so many fledglings, those that went into sports, like Wayne Sebastianelli, I guess, Kevin Black. There are all these people that were ultimate leaders. Ben Pellegrini went into joints in hand. Gene Del Signore went into hand. I think we all. Dan Wascher went into sports. We all identified as proteges. Whatever our discipline was, you know, we felt very proud of it, certainly Mac Evarts Dick Burton. But he was the one that didn't need the spotlight. And in a way he approached problems. Just. I mean, I think about him all the time doing hand surgery. And I'll quote things about arthroscopy.

07:30 Yes. And we were chatting before we started the recording of Kenny's hobby. After he stopped surgical practice, he went and did a course. I think it was somewhere in Ohio where he actually was a resident in a clock repair program. I believe it was a six month program where he actually spent the whole week working, learning the principles of clock repair. And my wife and I had a mantle clock that I heard Kenny present at this 20th century meeting on clock repair and spoke with him afterwards and said, would you take this clock on? So our daughter had a hockey game. She was at Amherst and they were playing Rochester. So we brought the clock to Ken and six months later we came back and picked it up. And it was. His methodical approach to fixing clocks was the same as clinical practice. So he gave us the chart on the clock which included the intake history of when it had last run. Were there any problems? Then the next page was the physical diagnosis of what was wrong with the clock. Then it was the procedure of which Bushings he replaced. And then it was the outcome which he had it on a clock stand and ran for two hours or two weeks with it only being off by a second. So it was just like patient care, except with a mechanical object. It was a fabulous experience.

09:13 Oh, I love it. Yeah, it's so true. So obviously kept in touch with him after I left Rochester and went on to Stanford and I visit them because my mom was still in Rochester and they had moved to a condo. And Jean was the artist, right. And she had this whole basement which is her art studio and she seated half of it to Ken for his clock repair. And it was really funny because there was almost like a line, you know, do not cross the line, do not bother me while we're. While we're working. And I was watching his tools and it set up. I think he had, like, a workbook or something.

09:50 Yeah.

09:51 I'm like, Ken, you turned into a hand surgeon. No, that would be a watch repair person.

10:01 Oh, what a great, great guy. And we miss him very much. I trust you stay in touch with Jean.

10:09 I do, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I have not. I've only seen pictures, but she made a beautiful quilt of Ken's ties.

10:17 Yeah.

10:17 The many accolades he had and that, you know, no one wears ever again. But make it in something that was very meaningful and beautiful.

10:26 Yeah.

10:28 Special.

10:29 Yeah. Well, thanks, Amy, for speaking with us about Ken and was a great contributor to this society, and we miss him very much. And perhaps others will listen to this in the future and get a chance to hear about this great friend.

10:47 Well, thanks for the honor of speaking about our great friend.

10:50 Yeah. Thank you.