In May of 2015, ultrarunning champion Dave Mackey went out for a trail run on a pleasant morning in Boulder, Colorado, planning on tagging Bear Peak in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains as part of a par-for-the-course long run.
Bear is a peak he’d summited hundreds of times before—it’s in his backyard—but he stepped on a rock he’d likely stepped on numerous times before, and it shifted. The rock, estimated to weigh between 300 to 400 pounds, proceeded to knock Mackey down and pin him underneath it.
A life-threatening situation turned into an epic rescue and the beginning of a long and painful journey. Since sustaining the open tibia/fibula fracture to his left leg, Mackey, who works as an emergency room physician assistant, has undergone 13 surgeries. Many of those surgeries have been unsuccessful or exacerbated the problems.
It’s a journey that Mackey hopes to change with a decision he announced via Facebook on Tuesday to have his lower leg amputated in Boulder next week.
“Do I continue with more surgeries with very high likelihood of failure? More time in a hellish external fixator? And even then there would always be pain,” he wrote.
“But there is another solution, the definite, non-reversible one, to be 100% to where I was before the accident and almost completely pain-free. There is a way to get here and I've decided to go this route. This would mean the freedom, if I choose it, to walk the kids to school without a thought, ski, run in 6-8 weeks, compete in races again…”
Mackey has suffered through infections, skin, muscle and bone grafting (some which didn’t take), excessive scar tissue, and lately, a rod that’s wobbling within his leg and causing pain.
The 46-year-old’s Facebook post mentioned that while he’s gone from not walking at all, to walking with a cane, to walking without assistance—albeit, slowly and not without a limp—he’s still in severe pain and nowhere near running.
About a month ago, Mackey, who was the 2011 Ultrarunner of the Year and has consistently posted top performances for 15 years, had a CT scan that showed the rod in the middle of the tibia “wobbling around,” and a bone graft he had done not taking.
“I had information before that indicating that there was stuff going on—weird aches and pains. But those two things were causing what I’d been feeling,” Mackey told Runner’s World.
He says the options to take care of the most recent issues involved more bone grafting, where doctors would take bone from his right femur. (He’d already had his left femur grafted.)
“The real issue was the bone grafting would probably not work the second time, since it didn’t the first,” Mackey said.
Mackey explained how after speaking with many orthopedists and specialists that he felt the next surgery would have only a 10 to 20-percent chance of working. “Plus, he said, “the issue would still remain that I’d have pain below that site, and limited mobility, less functionality. All of that made amputation the last logical step.”
Mackey said that he also ran into rock climber Malcolm Daly in Boulder this past summer, and that started the conversation about amputation being a viable option. Daly, who suffered a mountaineering accident in 1999. After two years of struggles, he opted to have his lower leg amputated. Despite this, Daly has continued to climb and mountaineer at an extremely high level post-amputation.
“I talked to Malcolm a week or two ago,” Mackey said. “That conversation was pretty critical. I knew speaking with him would be helpful. Knowing what Malcolm has done as a climber after his accident helped a lot, as far as reassurance.”
Mackey said he’s grateful to be able to make the decision to amputate now, “logically,” as opposed to waking up from an accident to find his leg was gone.
“The kids took it pretty well,” Mackey said of his 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son. And though his son asked if the leg “will grow back,” Mackey said that telling them “wasn’t too hard,” really,” and that they are all looking ahead.
Mackey said he is in contact with a prosthetics company—Horizon Prosthetics—in Colorado and is optimistic about the future for his quality of life.
