Steve Webb discovered he has had a broken leg for 29 years and will now have an operation to grow back 6cm of dead bone Photo: GEOFF ROBINSON

Steve Webb, 49, broke his left leg in a motorbike crash when he was 20-years-old. But after suffering decades of pain he found it had never actually healed.

Mr Webb, from Dagenham, Essex, said he only realised he still had the injury after it showed up on a hospital scan.

He had feared the leg might have to be amputated under the knee but instead he is about to have an operation to stretch the broken bone back together.

"I think it's extraordinary. Everyone tells me that having a broken leg for nearly 30 years is unheard of.

"I've had trouble with my leg ever since the accident but I was repeatedly told the bone had healed so I carried on walking on it."

Mr Webb, a plumbing merchant, broke his leg when he crashed his Suzuki T250 Hustler motorbike into a lamppost when he was just 20.

The bone pierced his skin and he spent two months in hospital after his leg became infected and swollen.

He spent 17 months in a plaster cast and doctors believed his leg had healed but when he went into hospital for an operation on his toe they found it was wobbly and still broken.

He then had electro magnetic therapy for nine months, but five years after the accident he was still in pain. Doctors then found his leg was still broken so they put it in a metal plate.

Mr Webb had the metal plate for 24 years, then last year he suddenly had pains in his leg again.

Scans showed an infection in the bone and when the metal plate was removed they showed the bone was still broken after more than 29 years.

He will now have a metal Ilazarov frame fitted around his leg and foot to stretch the bone 1mm each day for seven to nine months. Then he will be in plaster for a further three months.

He has been told the new procedure, which he will have done at Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford, has a 99 per cent chance of success.