Orthopaedic surgeon Jheri Wade knows well the pain of being barred from playing sports due to a sports injury.A couple of years ago he was playing cricket in Trinidad and collided with another player. He ripped his Achilles tendon and soon found himself on the ward with some of his own patients.“It gives you greater understanding of what the patient has to go through in terms of rehabilitation,” he said.Dr Wade is a bit of a sports nut playing golf, squash, tennis and cricket so being forbidden from sports for six months was almost more excruciating than the injury itself.Dr Wade, 50, worked in Trinidad for Port of Spain General Hospital for nine and a half years. He has now returned home to Bermuda to establish himself and eventually set up his own orthopaedic practice. He has brought the number of orthopaedic surgeons on the Island to six.He did his first degree at Dalhousie in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada, and then went to the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom to do his medical degree.“After that I went wherever the job took me,” he said. “I have been all over the United Kingdom. I have been as far north as Liverpool and Lancaster. In the last few months I was in England I was down on the south coast at Eastbourne. I have now had experience working in different countries. I decided to come back to Bermuda because I was ready to come home.”He said Trinidad was different from Bermuda because it is bigger and has a much larger population which means the volume of traumas and injury through violence was much higher.Dr Wade said one of the most challenging things about orthopaedics was patching someone up after a bad accident.“Sometimes you get multiple traumas,” he said, “like broken arms and broken legs and broken pelvises. Those are often difficult to fix. The bones are in a lot of pieces so putting them back together isn’t always easy. Getting it back together so that it is what it was before is often a problem. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just do the best you can.”He was always interested in orthopaedics even as a medical student, and has never veered from that path.“It is creative in the sense you do a lot with your hands,” he said. “You are fixing things. It is very practical. There are a lot of specialised tools involved. Some people call orthopaedics a kind of carpentry, which is true. You use a lot of plates and screws for fixing fractures.”Dr Wade is hoping now to take up playing cricket again.“I played when I was younger here,” he said. “Then when I went to Trinidad there was a doctors’ team and I played for them. I hope there will be something here for me. This year there is no commercial league, though. Otherwise, I will have to satisfy myself with watching it.”At the moment he is working out of Dr Steven Trott’s office on Berry Hill Road in Paget. as he hasn’t yet got his own office together. He is seeing patients through physician referrals and through the fracture clinic at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital.