Young athlete pays tribute to Kingston General Hospital surgeons who saved his leg from amputation

29 Apr, 2025

'I won’t ever forget what everyone at KGH did for me'

Callum Stapley almost lost his leg in a rollover accident in an ATV in December 2022. After surgeons and staff at Kingston General Hospital saved his leg he designed a tattoo to pay tribute to them. Courtesy of Callum Stapley. Photo by Courtesy of Callum Stapley for the Kingston Whig-Standard.

If you look at Callum Stapley’s lower left leg, it’s not exactly configured like you’d see the appendage laid out in Grey’s Anatomy, nothing like, say, the limb sculpted by Michelangelo for his David.

You might not immediately pick up the unconventional lines of Stapley’s ankle, because other lines, those across the back of his calf, would draw your attention: the bold lines of a tattoo that spell out three letters in an old English font: KGH.

With ink of this sort, many would assume that these are the initials of a loved one, though people in Kingston might think it’s a coincidence that the letters spell out the acronym for Kingston General Hospital. No coincidence.

“I wanted to do something for KGH, so I came up with the idea of the tattoo and then worked on a design on my notebook,” Stapley said by phone from Calgary. “The surgeons at KGH saved my leg. I was at a real risk of an amputation from the injury I suffered. I don’t know what my life would look like if they hadn’t been there for me.”

Stapley, originally from Whitby, was in Kingston in December 2022 for a hockey game — he was a 16-year-old playing for the under-18 team in the Whitby Wildcats program. After his game on the Saturday morning, Callum went with his mother Lisette to visit one of her friends near Glenburnie before the drive home. While they caught up, Callum took out an ATV into the bush and after a time he wound up in a world of trouble, rolling the vehicle, the roll cage crushing his leg.

“I managed to lift (the ATV) just enough to get my leg out — it was all the adrenaline, and it hadn’t sank in what happened,” Stapley said. “Bone was sticking out of leg and there was blood everywhere. I made a tourniquet, because I was thinking that I was going to bleed out, that I might pass out and die there.”

Stapley had his phone with him and managed to dial 911, but he faced a problem with the dispatcher: He didn’t know where he was. “I told them I was north of Kingston and asked if they could figure out where I was from my cell,” he said, still sounding exasperated. “They said the service didn’t work where I was.”

Though paramedics were only a few minutes away, the hold-up meant a half hour passed before paramedics put his leg in a brace and loaded him into the back of an ambulance for the ride to KGH emergency with sirens blaring. Stapley’s mother was in the back of the ambulance with him and called her husband, who was in Waterloo where their daughter had just come off the ice after a hockey game.

“I knew this was serious, really serious,” said his father, Robert, a school teacher. “We stopped in Whitby to get a change of clothes because I knew that we were going to be in Kingston for a while.”

It turned out that Callum was going to be in a hospital bed at KGH for almost a month and Robert was going to be his roommate, spending the entire time in a chair beside his son. “I don’t know how he slept in it and with a mask, because this was during the pandemic,” the younger Stapley said.

When the paramedics brought Stapley into the ER, physicians immediately understood that they were on the clock.

“Callum’s was a limb-threatening injury,” Dr. Linden Head, a plastic surgeon at Kingston Health Sciences Centre who specializes in reconstructions of appendages, said in an interview. “The first priority on his arrival was external fixation—a cleaning of the wound to prevent any infection.”

This was no small thing the way Stapley remembers it. “I know looking at it when I was waiting for the ambulance there were stones in the wound,” he said.

Over the course of two days the surgical teams at KGH were able to stabilize the wound and stave off any infection. Only then could reconstruction begin.

First it would be the orthopedic team headed by Dr. Jeff Yach with the setting of bones, the insertions of plates and rods, and the reattachments of arteries and veins. Then Dr. Head would come in for the grafting of skin and tissue from his right upper leg to his lower left, which might sound far less complex and challenging as it was. Around the wound much of the tissue, subcutaneous fat, was, in Dr. Head’s words “non-viable,” a polite way of saying dead. “There was an area of 10 to 15 centimetres where the tissue was missing,” the surgeon said.

“I lost count of the surgeries, five or six, it might have been more,” Stapley said. “I remember there was an emergency after the surgeries on a weekend, past midnight. They called him at home, and he was at KGH and had me in the OR in an hour. I don’t know if he ever sleeps. He’s unbelievable.”

When told of Stapley’s description, Dr. Head, a Kingston native and Queen’s alum, was both warmed and amused. “Reconstructions are my area of focus and what I love to do, and the hours are just like that,” he said.

Dr. Head said limb reconstructions like Stapley’s are “relatively uncommon” and that his team would see serious cases about a dozen times across a year. Stapley’s, he said, was especially memorable, and not only because of its severity. “Callum came in on Dec. 4, 2022, and I started (at Kingston Health Sciences Centre) the month before.”

Stapley was in a room at KGH for his 18th birthday and Christmas, but he was wheeled out of the building before New Year’s. He was far from out of the woods, however. Over the course of four weeks his weight dropped from 185 pounds to 135. He was on blood thinners. He had to have his leg resting above his heart. “In the beginning, I could lower my leg a minute of the day,” he said. “And every day after that I could add another 30 seconds. After four months, I could start to try walking.”

Dr. Head said a good outcome in a procedure like Stapley’s would be a recovery that allowed the patient to walk and lead an active life. Stapley, though, had it in mind that he wanted to play hockey again. He had played AAA hockey and had been captain of his high-school team. The pros were never in the picture, but maybe junior A would have been. He had asked the team at KGH to do whatever they could so that his foot could fit in a skate — reasonable people could believe this wasn’t just wishful but a pure fantasy.

Robert Stapley said that his son, always dedicated in the gym, became even more intense in training to come back. “I wondered if it was too much sometimes,” he said. He played other sports but wanted to play hockey again — “some closure,” his father called it. He even got in a practice skate with the Ontario Hockey League’s Oshawa Generals. In the movies, the script would call for the hero to come all the way back, but Callum Stapley wouldn’t make it to the show or anything like that — his victory was just getting an oversize skate on and keeping up with those he had played with and against before he almost lost his leg.

“It’s a testament to Callum’s commitment,” Dr. Head said. “There’s only so much that is in our hands. We can put bones together and put skin and soft tissue back together. But getting through the pain, the rehab, that solely his, a success that he’s earned himself.” That’s not how Stapley sees it.

“If you look at the tattoo, you’ll see at the bottom I put in ‘Doctor H,’ ” he said. “I won’t ever forget what everyone at KGH did for me, but the tattoo’s my way of letting them know that I appreciate everything and it’s with me forever.”

View Full Article from The Kingston Whig Standard

Young athlete pays tribute to Kingston General Hospital surgeons who saved his leg from amputation

'I won’t ever forget what everyone at KGH did for me'

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