(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) CHICAGO _ For years, Dr. Olabisi Claudius-Cole hobbled on aching knees to perform emergency C-sections, dispense HIV medicine, and reattach limbs severed by rebels in her war-torn Sierra Leone.

Grateful patients too poor to pay Cole's $3 fee would instead shower the West African physician with baskets of fruit, fish, or live chickens. Cole accepted the gifts with grace, without a word about money or a thought that her good deeds might one day reap a reward.

And they may never have, had life's twists not led the African woman to walk into the Morton Grove, Ill., office of an orthopedic surgeon who would replace her throbbing knees for free and make it possible for her to stand again for hours treating patients in her clinic.

But last July, Cole, 48, did walk into the office of Dr. Wayne Goldstein, head of orthopedic surgery at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Ill. And as the physician listened to the soft-spoken woman describe her aches and pains, he realized she was using medical language unusual for an ordinary patient.

"Her questions were really quite sophisticated for a lay person," Goldstein recalled. Curious, he asked her where she was from. She told him she was a doctor in Sierra Leone. "I remembered it was a very difficult place, where there had been civil war."

More conversation followed, and Goldstein found himself fascinated by Cole's experiences practicing medicine in her impoverished country. She told him about the young girls whose families kept them at home during difficult labor, rushing them at the last minute to her clinic for a C-section.

She described the patients who suffered from HIV and AIDS, the teenaged girls who had been raped, the boys and men who showed up at her clinic with gunshot wounds and severed limbs.

She told him how constant pain had forced her to sit on a high stool to examine patients and perform surgeries. Listening to her, Goldstein thought of the ancient Talmudic injunction: "If you save one life, it is as though you have saved the world."

"I thought, `we have to get her back to work so she can save the world,'" Goldstein said. "I told her I wouldn't charge her a penny." Neither, it turned out, would the hospital or the company that provided the implants.

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Drawing on 22 years of experience as a joint replacement specialist, Goldstein, 53, operated first on Cole's left knee. He cut out bone and cartilage and inserted into the hollow space metal joint replacements designed to mimic a knee's proper movement.

Four weeks later, after Cole's left knee had begun to heal, Goldstein repeated the 35-minute operation on her right knee. She is now recuperating at her sister's house in Evanston, Ill.

In the sunlit living room, where she sits in a cushioned chair next to a walker and cane, Cole talked about her medical practice, the surgery, and the fate that led her to Goldstein.

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Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, Cole grew up at the clinic her parents, both physicians, founded more than 40 years ago. A four-room clinic occupied the ground floor; the family lived on the floor above.

Gradually, her father built additions to the modest structure, expanding onto the lot next door and adding another floor. Today, the West End Clinic, as it is called, is a three-story hospital with an operating room and 21 beds.

Overweight as a child, Cole used to skip rope and run stairs to lose weight, she said. She always had trouble with her knees and hips; sometimes her parents had to pick her up off the floor and she spent part of her childhood in traction.

As she grew older and became a physician, she stood for hours at the clinic each day as she toggled between the operating room and the patients' recovery beds. The condition of her knees, worn out by exercise and worn down by severe arthritis, worsened.

She hobbled and limped at the clinic and to and from medical conferences and charity fundraisers.

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Meanwhile in 1997, her sister, Olufemi Davies, a registered nurse who works at several hospitals in Chicago and Evanston, won the U.S. immigration lottery and moved to Evanston. Cole's knees hurt so badly, she stopped going to official functions. She stopped climbing the stairs to church. Eventually she stopped getting up to examine patients, employing the high stool instead.

"Getting up, sitting down _ akh, it was painful," Cole said. "It was becoming a nightmare for me."

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Cole told her sister, Olufemi Davies, about her condition, and Davies started asking questions. She asked colleagues for recommendations. She asked knee patients for the name of their doctor. Goldstein, they told her. She looked him up on the Internet.

With 11,000 joint replacements under his belt, Goldstein has perfected the procedure to enable eight or nine surgeries a day, installing new knees (and hips) with production-line efficiency.

In 2004, Goldstein listened to U2 rocker Bono give the commencement speech at his son's graduation ceremony at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a moving discourse about the power we have to change the world. Goldstein said the words inspired him.

Two years later, Cole walked into his office.

"I thought, `here's my chance,'" Goldstein said. "She embodies everything I wanted to be. I told her, `what you do is so great I almost feel unworthy.'"

Cole plans to return to Sierra Leone once her knees heal. She needs both hips replaced but doesn't want to spend the time away from her clinic now.

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She performed an emergency C-section the day she was supposed to leave for America, missing her flight. She worries about other emergencies that arise in her absence. In some cases, she is the only person who knows a patient has HIV.

Instead, she plans to return next year to undergo hip replacement. Goldstein said he would again donate his services.

"I am the clinic," she said. "I need to go home."

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