Good as advertised

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. – The doctor who helped save Barbaro’s life strides out of his office, plops into a chair and bangs his hands on the table in front of him.

“So,” he begins, “what do you want me to say?”

It is a strange and exhausting time for the cocky and self-confident Dean Richardson, head of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania’s George D. Widener Hospital for Large Animals, nestled near the Delaware state line where strip malls and multimillion-dollar horse farms live side-by-side, but worlds apart.

He is one of the country’s best horse surgeons. And he reconnected the pulverized right hind leg of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, a dark bay thoroughbred who charged ahead by 6 1/2 lengths to win at Churchill Downs – only to break down seconds out of the gate at the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, his foot flaring at gruesome angles before a gasping crowd at Pimlico Race Course and millions of television viewers.

Since the May 20 calamity, Richardson has become an instant celebrity. He is as blunt as his crewcut hair. He says exactly what he thinks and his colleagues are not surprised that he is feisty and cracks wise.

“If he hadn’t spoken directly, like the way he is, I would have wondered, ‘Who is that man? And what has he done with Dean Richardson?’ ” said Dr. Corinne Sweeney, the hospital’s executive director. She has known him since he walked in the hospital doors 27 years ago as a first-year intern.

What was he like then?

Sweeney laughs long and hard. “Much like he is now,” she says. “Except he’s mellowed. As a surgeon, I would say he’s the best, but then he’d smack me on the head and say, ‘I’m not the only one who can do this.’ “

What Richardson did, in more than five hours of surgery, was fuse a jigsaw puzzle of bones and flesh with a metal plate and 27 screws. The horse’s cannon bone, above the ankle, was broken. His sesamoid bone, behind the ankle, was snapped. The long pastern bone, below the ankle, was shattered into more than 20 pieces. His ankle was dislocated.

Richardson originally pronounced the now-beloved race horse’s injuries the “most catastrophic” he’d tried to repair.

Most horses with such injuries, he warned, “would have been put down at the race track.” Nearly two weeks out, Barbaro is not down. He improves daily, but Richardson remains unswayed by his patient’s high spirits.

“The problems we face with these kinds of injuries don’t always happen in the first five days or the first five weeks,” Richardson said in a recent interview at his hospital. “I keep saying that.”

Being direct is part of a plan conceived by medical center administrators.

“This is a huge risk for us to be so honest with the press. Because if it goes badly, we’ll all look worse. But we made a decision to tell the story as straight as we could tell it,” the 52-year-old surgeon said.