Matt Turnbull and his mom, Joanne

At first glance, Matthew Turnbull seems to lead a typical life for a 22-year-old. Born and raised in Bellevue, he now lives in Seattle in a house with a ping-pong table in the entryway, a big TV, and comfortable couches.

While he doesn’t play as many sports as he did as a teenager, the 6-foot, two-inch young man still keeps active. And he has an interesting new job—at an Internet retail company, Collegegear.com, started by his older brother.

All in all, it’s a pretty good life, and one that he appreciates more than most people his age. Two years ago, Matt was diagnosed with severe damage to his knee cartilage that threatened to destroy his ability to walk normally again.

But thanks to a donated tissue graft from the Northwest Tissue Services, Matt’s hard work, and the support of his close-knit family, he’s almost back to normal.

“This donation gave me my life back,” says Matt. “You just feel how lucky you are.” Though he describes himself as a bit shy, he opens up when he and his mother Joanne—an energetic, outgoing woman with a gift for putting others at ease—joins Matt in telling the story of his last two years.

“My husband and I witnessed our child almost become disabled, and the future looked very bleak.
But now through the gift of donation
and medical science, he’s once again the
human being he was meant to be.”
Joanne Turnbull

A “Bizarre” Case
Matt was a 19-year-old student at Bellevue Community College when he first started noticing pains in his right leg. Since he was extremely active—he played several hours of basketball a day—no one thought much of it, including Matt.

Then he woke up one Sunday morning in October and couldn’t move his leg. And when he tried, it was extremely painful.

“We literally watched our son go from being active and healthy to crippled, overnight,” says Joanne.

Matt was living at home in Bellevue at the time, where his parents had raised him and his two brothers and younger sister. After a trip to the ER, the Turnbulls saw a respected local orthopedic surgeon, Clayton Brandes, M.D., of Bellevue Orthopedic Associates.

Dr. Brandes recommended an arthroscopy, a minor surgery that allows the physician to see the entire knee joint. He suspected a tear in the meniscus, a common injury to knee cartilage.

“But when the doctor came out of surgery,” says Joanne, “he was absolutely stricken.” In his hand, Dr. Brandes was holding a jar filled with cartilage from Matt’s knee. The cartilage hadn’t torn; rather, a great deal of it had loosened from the femur, the long thighbone. And the surgeon didn’t know why.

Remembers Joanne: “He said, ‘This is so bizarre, I’ve never seen anything like it.’”

“Bizarre” was a word that the Turnbulls would hear many times over the following months, as they searched for solutions to Matt’s condition, with the help of Dr. Brandes.

At one point, Matt received a tentative diagnosis: Osteochondritis dissecans, a genetic defect that results in a fragment of bone and cartilage detaching from the end of the bone. In Matt’s case, the cartilage of the lateral femoral condyle—the rounded end of the femur under the kneecap—was affected, and the cartilage loss was unusually large.

	Matt (left) joined his brother David (right) on the set of “That ‘70s Show,” a visit that David bought at a charity auction. The brothers, who created a commercial for David’s Internet business, are currently working on developing a TV show of their own.

But No One had an Answer
Meanwhile, Matt’s condition didn’t improve. He tried crutches and a custom-made leg brace, but the pain persisted. At one point, amputation or fusion of the leg was even mentioned as a possibility.

“Matt had a great attitude,” said Joanne, “but his endurance level really started to deteriorate.” Matt managed a trip to Las Vegas for his 21st birthday, but it was bittersweet. “He couldn’t keep up,” says his mother. “It was at times like this when he realized, ‘Wow, I’m really not like I used to be.’”

Never Heard of Tissue Donation
Finally, seven months after that first Sunday morning, they saw another local doctor, James Bruckner, M.D., associate medical director at the Northwest Tissue Services and former associate professor of orthopedics at the University of Washington. Dr. Bruckner believed he had a potential solution to Matt’s condition: a bone and cartilage transplant.

“It was clear that Matt’s defect was the sort of thing that would result in a destroyed knee if it were allowed to persist,” says Dr. Bruckner. After reviewing the case, he suggested to the Turnbulls that Matt go on the Tissue Services’s list for a donation of bone and cartilage, which Dr. Bruckner could then fit and transplant to Matt’s knee.

The procedure is called an osteochondral allograft transplant, and Dr. Bruckner is one of only a few surgeons in the nation who perform it, using refrigerated bone and cartilage for a graft to a recipient’s knee. Because the bone and cartilage are refrigerated, instead of frozen, more cartilage cells survive the transplant.

The Northwest Tissue Services has become a national leader in developing safety protocols for these types of refrigerated transplants.

Like many other people, the Turnbulls had never heard of tissue donation before; it took them time to get used to the idea. “Dr. Bruckner gets to the point pretty fast,” says Joanne, smiling. “He came in with the x-rays and said ‘this is what I can do. Do you want it?’” After careful consideration and prayer, it was clear that the answer was “yes.”

“Matt was in so much pain,” said Joanne. “We had to take the gamble. And our luck in finding Dr. Bruckner was unbelievable.”

	“Matt is an ideal candidate for surgery like this. He’s a great patient. He’s very motivated, very fit and strong, and has extremely supportive parents.” Dr. James Bruckner, M.D.

A Good Fit
Matt went onto the transplant list at the beginning of June. By September, a match was found, a 27-year-old man from Eastern Washington who had died of sudden trauma.

“Based on the x-ray of Matt’s knee, I asked the Tissue Services to pick a male knee of at least that size or bigger,” says Dr. Bruckner. “Because of the geometry of the knee—each side has a unique double radius of curvature—you have to try to match the size fairly closely.”

The donation was a good fit. “The idea is to repair the defect with one large piece of bone and cartilage. I measure the defect and fashion a graft to match the defect,” the surgeon says. “It went very well.”

The surgery was uncomplicated and relatively short. “When Dr. Bruckner came out with a huge smile on his face, we were instantly relieved,” says Joanne.

While Matt was in recovery, the Turnbulls remember that younger doctors who had observed the surgery would stop by Matt’s hospital room to examine him and discuss how neatly the graft had fallen into place.

“They said that was the coolest thing they ever saw,” says Joanne. “They were thrilled to be part of it.”

And so was Matt. Despite the fact that recovery was long and painful, he knew that a normal life waited for him at the end. “It’s been an adventure,” he says, “It’s just changed my whole reality.”

Dr. Bruckner told the Turnbulls it would take Matt a full year to recover, and it has. He spent long hours in physical therapy and attached to a motion machine. “I watched a lot of movies,” Matt jokes.

But eventually, he was able to put full weight on his leg again. And though he won’t be playing basketball any time soon, he can participate in many other activities—even skiing.

“Matt is an ideal candidate for surgery like this,” says Dr. Bruckner. “He’s a great patient. He’s very motivated, very fit and strong, and has extremely supportive parents.”

His recovery was confirmed by x-rays taken during the Turnbulls’ recent—and final—visit to the surgeon, who now practices at Bellevue Orthopedic Associates with Dr. Brandes. “He said that this time you could no longer see where the bone had been cut, because the bone had totally fused into the new bone,” says Joanne.

The Turnbull family continues to be deeply influenced by their experience. They recently attended the annual Donor Family Gathering in Newcastle, Washington, and Joanne gave a talk about their experience (see Full Circle).

And Matt, for his part, is deeply grateful that the donation made his normal life possible. “Because of the
generosity of the donor and his family I’m able to live a healthy, pain-free life again,” he says, sitting at his dining room in his own Seattle home, which he moved into several months ago. “I feel so lucky to have this gift.”

Joanne echoes Matt’s feelings: “My husband and I witnessed our child almost become disabled, and the future looked very bleak. But now through the gift of donation and medical science, he’s once again the human being he was meant to be.”