Partial Knee Replacement Patient from Canada (1 year post-op)

My name is Greg. I currently live in, in Vancouver, Canada. I fell off a waterfall when I was 19 and hyperextended the knee and just severed the PCL ligament and continued to race motocross for another 15 years after that. So I had a meniscal it wasn't a repair, it's where they trim away the meniscus. And I lived with that until I was about 60 years old. I'm 62 now. And even after years of running and everything else, it seemed to hold out, but when it went, it went and I got to be bone on bone and collapsed on the medial side. And it became impossible to even walk a block without being in pain. So I went from one day being on the bike and elliptical and, and walk to literally a week later where I felt like I was crippled.

It was probably going skiing with my sons that did me in, you know, and that's when it just literally became very painful. I lived with that for two years and I saw every kind of doctor I could see in Canada. Nobody seemed to give me a solution that was reasonable to me that one of them wanted to do an osteotomy, which is they cut the bone and try to straighten your gate out so you're not bow-legged anymore. That just seemed barbaric. The other doctor said, just wait another five years, we'll do a full knee replacement. And I thought, I'm gonna, I can't live with this for five years. I'm 60, I've, I have teenage children, I wanna run around with them. I wanna live life with them. And I was so frustrated. So I went to like everybody, I went to the internet and started looking for knee replacements.
I said, doctors that were injecting to deal with the pain so you could walk around, still injured, but you didn't feel the pain. I thought, well, maybe that's a solution. Eventually, I don't know how long it took, but I got to find the Stone clinic, and oddly enough, I listened to a couple of patients just like what I'm doing now. And when I listened to what they had to say, how they had been athletic all their life, how they had had a repair, a reconstruction of some sort, and how they got back to doing what they loved, I was like, wow, this is either too good to be true, or I, I need to go check it out. And I live in Vancouver. It's a two-hour flight. I came to check it out. Luckily I did, <laugh> changed my, it changed my life. It really changed my life.

Here? So I think once I realized that there was something beyond, or more progressive or more advanced than a full knee replacement, and I saw that, you know, hey, there's a lot of other options here. I I did look at doctors in, I think Chicago and also in Miami. I never went to visit them. I think once I got on the phone with Dr. Stone, I just had such a good sense. I mean, this is the kind of guy that you, you leave going, God, I'm glad he went to medical school,

You know, in Canada we do have socialized medicine and they do everything they can to sort of not have to go into surgery. And if you do go into surgery, it's a long wait time. I, I couldn't put up with it any longer. After two years of, of messing around in the Canadian system, I just thought, this is enough's enough, I gotta go. And oddly enough, when I, you know, so I got my MRI, I got my, my x-ray had the consultation on the phone with Dr. Stone, and I got a good sense that he knew exactly what needed to be done. When I came down here, the twist in the story is that my knee was actually farther gone than the MRI probably showed.

And he said, look, you know, we can do the bio replacement on you, but it'll probably give you two, three years. If we do partial knee replacement, it's a, it's a whole new ball game. And I was, I trusted them. And that's part of what makes this so special is that when you put your trust into somebody and they really deliver it just, I mean, it takes the weight of the world off your shoulders and you take a sigh of relief and you're like, wow, I got my life back. So I came down here and he literally told me that on a, I guess a Tuesday, I went that afternoon for a CAT scan. The Wednesday I did my surgery and I stayed down for a week to go to what is really world class physiotherapy. And with I guess two, three weeks I'm off crutches within a couple of months, I'm walking around fairly normally again, I get, you know, I'm back at doing the elliptical back on the bike. I take it nice and slow. Andnow I'm a year later, one year later, and I feel like I have two perfectly good legs and knees and ankle. I have things like, like I was when I was 30. That's extraordinary to me.

The biggest challenge when you have a knee surgery, I think is the atrophy. You know, you lose your muscle tone, but they're so good to get you back, like almost right away, back on a bike within 24 hours, 36 hours to try to minimize that atrophy. And so I was a aware of that. So getting the, the bone, or not the bone, but getting the muscle strength back in the legs was, was the long term thing. And that took for me probably 10, 11 months. I feel like now I'm almost there about 95% of my left leg compared to my right leg. My right leg I think got very strong through the recovery because, you know, you're doing both legs, but you know, you are working out a lot just as part of your rehab. So the, the, the good leg gets stronger while the left leg has to, in my case, the left leg has to catch up, but it does.