By Frank Fitzpatrick, Philadelphia Enquirer, November 22, 2007

Billy Whiteside had a rare illness. But he came back.

Billy Whiteside’s uppermost rib sits in a sandwich bag in his parents'' Lancaster County home. The Villanova soccer player lost it, as well as most of his senior season, during a 71/2-hour operation in August.

And yet he has plenty to be thankful for today.

Few surgeons were willing to perform the operation Whiteside underwent on Aug. 15. Fewer patients escape the unspeakable pain in its aftermath. And no one, the doctors told him, would be able to bounce back in time for a soccer season that ended in less than three months.

But he defied expectations.

He found a surgeon in St. Louis. He needed just one Percocet following the operation and afterward felt little more than a twinge. More importantly for him, he made it back to the soccer field, playing in Villanova’s final three games.

"It was nearly miraculous," said his father, Bill Whiteside. "All that could have gone well went well. The first doctor who treated Billy started with ''Your soccer days are over.'' They said he’d miss two weeks of school but he never missed a day."

Had he not been so determined to play again, Whiteside, now 22, might have been more worried about the surgery to correct thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS), a rare condition in which the first rib and the collarbone combine to pinch a vein, creating life-threatening clots.

If, for example, he’d thought to solicit advice from Aaron Cook, who had the same procedure in 2004, here’s what the Colorado Rockies pitcher would have told him about the recovery process:

"I was crying in pain," recalled Cook, who missed nearly a year after the operation. "I don’t think I would wish this surgery on my worst enemy. That’s how much pain I was in."

Or perhaps, if he’d bothered to digest fully these cautionary words from his vascular surgeon, he’d have had second thoughts:

"Afterward, it’s going to feel like one of two things," Robert Thompson told Whiteside on his first visit. "You’re either going to think you’ve been hit by a train or you’re going to think you’ve been hit by a car."

Somehow, Whiteside avoided any wreck at all.

Somehow, his family found the physician most experienced with TOS surgery, one unafraid of its litigious possibilities. Somehow, their insurance covered the rare procedure, which was done at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. Somehow, there was no agony.

"I never actually felt any pain," Whiteside said.

Whiteside’s ordeal began in July, when, without warning, his left arm blew up to Popeye proportions, twice its normal size.

"It felt like it was going to explode," said the 6-foot-2, 185-pound communications major.

Doctors soon diagnosed TOS after discovering clots in the shoulder. They said the ailment, though rare, invariably occurred in athletes. Because of the vein’s proximity to the shoulder, they told the Whiteside’s, the typical victim was a baseball player, particularly a pitcher.

Cook, who came back from another injury to pitch in Game 4 of the 2007 World Series, the day after Whiteside returned to Villanova’s soccer team, had been extremely lucky, doctors said.

He’d attributed the pain and swelling in his arm to pitching’s wear and tear. As a result, the clots had grown large and deadly. It wasn’t until Cook complained of shortness of breath and dizziness during an August 2004 start that the real problem was uncovered.

"They’re still not really sure what caused it," said Bill Whiteside, the father, a salesman in Manheim Township, Lancaster County, who played hockey at Notre Dame, where his father, also named Bill, was a backup quarterback on Frank Leah’s 1949 national championship team.

"They later found that his rib had been fractured at some point and that there had been some calcification, which led to the blockage," he said.

Doctors at Lancaster General Hospital told the Whitesides that the standard course for TOS victims was to dissolve the clots with the blood-thinner Coumadin and wait two months for surgery.

"But that vein was [ticked] off," Bill Whiteside said. "As far as Billy was concerned, they couldn’t do it quickly enough."

Because people on Coumadin bruise easily, physical contact was out. Wildcats coach Larry Sullivan and Whiteside’s teammates anticipated that whatever happened next, he’d either redshirt or miss the entire season.

"I could have redshirted," Whiteside said, "but as a senior, I wanted to go out with my class, to graduate with them. I was determined to get back for those last few games."

Whiteside, Villanova’s fourth top scorer as a sophomore forward, was especially driven to return because a leg injury had limited him to just two games as a junior.

His family couldn’t find a local surgeon willing to perform the operation, which they were told was one of the most litigated in contemporary medicine.

A doctor who had done abdominal surgery on his mother, Barbara, a decade earlier recommended Thompson.

Within days, the Whitesides were in the surgeon’s St. Louis office, where the autographed jerseys of Cook and his other athlete-patients adorned the walls.

"That was Aug. 13," Bill Whiteside said. "On Aug. 15, he had the surgery."

There was nothing normal about it.

Typically a 10-hour procedure, this one took 21/2 hours less. The 3-inch bowed rib - the costa prima - Thompson removed was, he told the Whitesides, unusually large. During surgery, a vein in Whiteside’s wrist was connected to an artery to increase blood flow.

Most importantly, Whiteside followed the rehabilitation regimen - most of the exercises involved raising his arm a little higher each day.

"I just tried to stay positive and do what the doctors told me to do," Whiteside said.

He recovered in time to dress for - but not play in - the Wildcats'' Oct. 27 loss at Cincinnati.

Four days later, he played 25 minutes in a 1-0 loss at Penn State. He started in and played most of a 1-1 tie with Louisville on Senior Day and the 2-0 Big East tournament loss at West Virginia that ended the Wildcats'' season and Whiteside’s soccer career.

"I’m pretty emotional," Bill Whiteside said. "I knew for years that Senior Day would be a gut-wrenching experience. Instead, it was a day of elation, just knowing how hard Billy worked to make it back. I was the one senior parent who smiled the whole day."