VERMILION — Andy Pena’s appetite for morbid curiosity can be satisfied by the mere touch of a button. He can flip open his phone and send any man, woman or child fleeing to the foothills.
It’s all right there, photographed and documented: a hideous reminder of just about the strangest, most inexplicable injury anyone has ever heard of.
How or why it had to happen to Pena is a matter of chance. It all started with a standard charley horse — one of the most common of sports injuries. But what followed was a terrifying reminder of the strange and sudden turns that life can take and how thin the line is between misfortune and blind luck.
Pena, a senior point guard for the Vermilion Sailors, underwent surgery on Jan. 4 to remove a blood clot in his thigh which had cut off circulation to his lower leg, a procedure which was performed just hours before an amputation of his foot or leg would have been necessary.
“Doctors told me that, basically, I won the lottery,” Pena said. “If my parents hadn’t taken me to the doctor when they did and I hadn’t gotten through ER quickly and into surgery, I would’ve lost it. I am very lucky.”
Pena’s tale began Jan. 3 in basketball practice when he was sprinting down the court, turned and cut to run the other way. Out of Pena’s blind side came teammate Justin Turner. There was a collision and Turner’s knee dug into Pena’s left leg.
In medical terms, it was nothing more than a contusion — a bruise — in the quadriceps muscle of his interior thigh. Pena had dealt with these dozens of times over the years.
The next morning, he rolled out of bed with a slight limp — exactly what he expected. That night, the Sailors were scheduled to face the Rocky River Pirates in a key West Shore Conference matchup. There was no doubt Pena would be ready to play.
“When I woke up and took a shower that morning, I felt a knot in my leg,” Pena said. “All you really need to do is ice it, heat it up a little, have the trainer work with it and loosen it up.”
But within two hours, Pena became aware something was wrong.
The first clue came in English class. Pena looked down at his leg and could see through his jeans that swelling at ensued. When the bell rang, he tried to get up from his desk and became aware he couldn’t bend his leg. Pena hobbled down the Vermilion High School hallway to the nurse’s office and loaded ice packs on his leg. He took three Advil. It had no effect.
Finally, assistant principal Ralph Mayer, who also serves as athletic director, called Pena’s parents and suggested he see a doctor. By this point, Pena was on crutches and was unable to move his leg.
His mother, Susan, made the quickest appointment available with their family practitioner. Within only a few minutes of seeing her son, she recognized the gravity of the situation.
“I’ve had three kids and all three played team sports,” Susan Pena said. “You just kind of get used to the injuries and what symptoms to look for. But I had a sixth sense that this one was more serious. I don’t know why. Part of it was Andy — he doesn’t complain about injuries. But he was about this one.”
By noon, Pena’s foot was purple. His knee, all the way down his lower leg, felt like it had been sitting in a bucket of ice water — freezing. His thigh had swollen to twice its normal width.
Pena was immediately sent to the emergency room at Community Health Partners in Lorain. Doctors couldn’t find a pulse in his left leg. The pressure was nine times greater than normal. Within an hour, he was given anesthesia and put under the knife.
Surgeons were shocked by what they discovered.
“What they found was the blood had coagulated — it was like Jello in a bowl,” Susan Pena said. “It was all just caught in the skin and hiding in there, like it was in Saran Wrap, and hardening. And the pressure was so intense, it couldn’t get blood down to his foot.”
Blood hardening underneath the skin isn’t so unusual — the location in this instance, however, was. Pena was told by doctors they see it in the arm or by the ankle.
Dr. Frank Sabo, an orthopedic surgeon, performed the procedure, cutting an eight-inch line up the back of Pena’s thigh.
“When he cut the skin, it was so swollen the muscle basically popped out,” Pena said. “He told me the muscles around there were already starting to die. So they wrapped it up and let it drain out of there.”
Over the next 72 hours, Pena’s leg was left open. The muscle was literally hanging out of the skin. Disgusted, yet darkly curious, Pena reached for his cell phone and snapped a photo for posterity.
The next morning, Vermilion’s coaching staff came to his room to watch the film of the Rocky River game. The Sailors, all solemnly aware of what had happened to their veteran point guard, beat the Pirates, 56-50.
Within hours, the entire basketball team was in the hospital room keeping him company.
“I don’t think he had any time alone during his three days there,” Susan Pena said. “There was always someone with him.”
Three weeks have passed since that swift, strange turn of events. Every day, Pena goes to physical therapy, working to regain the full range of motion in his leg. Doctors estimate he is still two-to-three weeks away from being ready to return to the basketball court.
“I see him in there every day working through it,” Vermilion basketball coach Kurt Habermhel said. “He’s an amazing kid. He’s off his crutches already and now it’s a matter of building that muscle back to where he can run pain-free.”
The experience was sobering. Pena, who has played sports his whole life with a reckless abandon, was suddenly made aware at how fragile the axis of one’s world can be.
“It’s amazing to think how fast it all happened,” he said. “I don’t think anyone understood what was happening. I just know that I won the lottery and that I’m very lucky to be where I am today.”
Contact Pete Alpern at 329-7137 or at palpern@chroniclet.com.

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