His Knees Bent the Wrong Way. Standing Hurt. Classmates Mocked Him. Then Three Surgeons Spent Four Hours Putting His Legs Right.

Aldrin was 11 and living in the Philippines when simply standing for more than a few minutes hurt. He had been born with congenital knee dislocation: the joints faced the wrong direction. A surgeon later compared the silhouette to a flamingo. Walking any distance was hard. At school, some children made that the joke. His last name was kept out of the public accounts. The condition was not subtle. What was missing was affordable surgery.

That arrived at Tebow CURE Hospital in Davao City, opened in 2014 by the Tim Tebow Foundation and CURE International to treat children whose families could not pay for orthopedic care. Medical director Dr. Tim Mead and two other surgeons planned a reconstruction of joints, tendons and femurs.

Four hours in theatre. Casts afterward to protect the repairs. Then the harder part: physiotherapy, braces, a walker, the slow work of teaching legs a new direction. Mead wrote that with that work Aldrin should be able to stand tall and walk without the stare that had followed him. Foundation video later showed him taking steps. Tebow said lives were being changed at the hospital every day. Around that time the partnership cited more than 2,000 surgeries; the hospital has since treated thousands more.

Years later Tebow would say Aldrin reminded him of another Filipino boy, Sherwin, whom he had met as a teenager — a child hidden because his feet pointed backward. Aldrin, after surgery and rehab, walked a red carpet at a Night to Shine event with him. The medical story is straightforward: a late, complex correction of a deformity that should have been treated much earlier. The human one is a boy who could finally stand without paying for it in pain.

Sources

Fox News / FOX 35 Orlando reporting on Aldrin and Tebow CURE (July 2018)
FOX 5 and Tim Tebow Foundation releases on the four-hour operation
CURE International blog commentary by Dr. Tim Mead