Bostrom Has Surgery

Paul Carruthers | July 28, 2010

Ben Bostrom was only able to enjoy his win in Sunday’s AMA Superbike race at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca for one night. On Monday morning he went under the knife at Dr. Arthur Ting’s in San Jose, California, with Ting repairing the badly broken thumb that Bostrom suffered in his crash during practice at Mid-Ohio just 10 days earlier.”It’s painful,” Bostrom said this morning from his home in Malibu, California. “The surgery was so gnarly. The only bad surprise, I guess two bad surprises. Because we waited so long, we waited 10 days, and the tendon had shrank up pretty bad up into the arm and it was hard to pull back. And since it wasn’t severed, they couldn’t just stitch it all back together. It had torn itself from the bone and so it created some complications. I don’t know what they are going to do until I go back up to Ting tomorrow and get this big old vintage cast taken off and find out how the pins are placed in how they anchored it back to the bone. But damn does it hurt. They must have flayed open the top and the bottom of the thumb and they locked the joint up so I don’t break up all his work before they reconstructed the joint and stuff.”He’s driven an external pin through my thumbnail and down through the thumb so it locks the thumb straight and that thing hurts, man. It’s so uncool. I didn’t realize how bad I was off, actually. He showed me on Sunday before my race: He [Ting] grabbed the knuckle and the knuckle is supposed to bend inward and he took mine and bent it sideways and down… the knuckle needed to be reconstructed because there was nothing holding the thing together. That was kind of scary. He was worried we’d pulled the tendon from the bone, and that’s exactly what we had done. On the side of bone it got smashed with something and broke part of the bone off. That wasn’t the part where the tendon got torn off so it’s a different place. I sound retarded because I haven’t really seen what’s done. When the surgery was over, Ting had to fly out of there so I haven’t got to see the guy so I don’t have good details of what went on – other than him calling me. And I was still kind of under anastesia.”Bostrom is hoping for good news when he gets back to Ting’s tomorrow as he only has two weeks before he’s supposed to race again.”I’ve got a good bike now,” Bostrom said. “Yamaha has given us some decent motor and with a decent motor you should win. I have two more weeks so we’ll see.”