In the months after a roadside bomb in Afghanistan blew off part of his left thigh, Sgt. Ron Strang wondered if he would ever be able to walk normally again.
The explosion and subsequent rounds of surgery left Sergeant Strang, 28, a Marine, with a huge divot in his upper thigh where the quadriceps muscle had been. He could move the leg backward, but with so much of the muscle gone he could not kick it forward. He could walk, but only awkwardly.
“I got really good at falling,” he said of his efforts. And Sergeant Strang, a tall, athletic man, had to give up running.
But that was two years ago. Now he walks easily, can run on a treadmill and is thinking of a post-military career as a police officer. “If you know me, or know to look for it, you can see a slight limp,” he said. “But everybody else, they go, ‘I would never have guessed.’ ”
There is something else they would never have guessed: Sergeant Strang has grown new muscle thanks to a thin sheet of material from a pig.
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