When a teacher in Erie went to the dentist to figure out why his jaw felt funny, he thought it might be receding gums, an issue with his teeth or just the normal aches and pains of aging. But when he learned what was really happening to him, he turned to a surgeon in Pittsburgh to solve it, and that surgeon turned on his 3D printer.

Andy Potocki went to the dentist in February of 2024 and asked his hygienist about some tenderness in his jaw.

"She said, 'well, let's take a pano and see,' and so they did a panoramic X-ray, and boom, there it was," Potocki said. 

Potocki, a father, science teacher, hockey player and wedding DJ up in Erie, had a tumor invading his jawbone. It was pushing aside his teeth and growing around his nerves. He met with an oral surgeon who diagnosed him with ameloblastoma.

"The first thing he told me was, 'don't Google it,'" Potocki said. 

He said once he got his diagnosis, he learned Dr. Matt Spector in Pittsburgh was one of three surgeons recommended to take out the tumor. And Dr. Spector has a secret weapon in UPMC's 3D printing lab.

"They will give me an exact, basically, replica of Andy's jaw," Spector said. 

"They have a clean room where they can actually build models that we can use on patients and touch patients. And so it's very rare to have one of those around the country," he said.

They scanned Potocki's face and leg, where Dr. Spector would remove part of his fibula bone and use it to rebuild his jaw. 

"You can see the tumor here and you can see the exact margins of the tumor. So I know when I go in there exactly where we need to make our cut," Spector said. 

Spector says the practice of fibula transfers is a couple of decades old, but new tools mean new breakthroughs.

"The 3D modeling and the engineering behind it is what's really been the big step forward," he said.

What used to be a procedure that would take multiple surgeries over six months to a year, sidelining the patient from their life, is now much faster.

"'Jaw in a day' is kind of the, yeah, is a quick name for it. You wake up and you have teeth and you have all your dental structures intact," said Spector. 

While reconstructing Potocki's jaw was a six-hour surgical sprint, recovery was much more like a marathon. Luckily, Potocki has experience with those, and when training to run long distances, he'd tell himself that he just had to make it to the next mailbox.

"So I kind of applied that mentality to the process, right? So now we've got a date for the surgery. OK, the surgery happens. OK, let's get the recovery going in the hospital. Then I get home, that's a mailbox, right? Then I get off the feeding tube, that's a mailbox. So everything was like, what's the next goal?" he said. 

Since the surgery in May of 2024, he's reached a number of mailboxes, most recently, getting his final dental implants in. 

"Each time they put in a new set of teeth, I had to relearn a little bit how to talk," he said. 

With the help of the 3D printed guides, everything was part of that jaw-in-a-day surgery.

"They had the sockets for the implants in the leg bone before they removed the leg bone from the leg," said Potocki said. 

Spector says there are applications for this tech for everything from cancer treatment to trauma cases. 

"So you're in an accident and maybe your jaw is shattered, there's only little pieces of bone there that really can't be put back together, we can make a mirror image from your other side, right, from a CAT scan that you had, rebuild the jaw with that mirror image, so you have the same projection, the same height, and everything can look very normal from the outside with that trauma technology," Spector said. 

Andy Potocki says his fellow teachers in Erie helped support his family when he had to miss the last 32 days of the school year for his surgery, sending gift cards and cash and helping pay for his wife to stay in Pittsburgh for the first week of Andy's recovery.

He says going back for the first day of school and thanking his colleagues was another mailbox.