Partial Knee Replacement Patient 6 Months Post-Op

AUTOTRANSCIPT:

So, day one, I was just out there by myself, just getting back used to my skis, et cetera. Day two, I was meeting a friend and he charges down the mountain and we used to ski together. And he's been going all season, right? It was my day two, and I was able to follow him down the mountain and keep up. And I'm, I'm hitting my turns. It was just groom slopes, steep groom slopes, and I'm hitting my turns and just, I'm waiting for the pain. And it never really came all day. I played soccer most of my life. And obviously a lot of running back and forth. Also constantly cycling and skiing and snowboarding. And I ended up wearing down the cartilage on the inside of my right knee over the years. And it was unclear exactly what, you know, why the right knee instead of the left knee.

The only thing I can think of is snowboarding is asymmetrical. The right knee would've been my rear knee holding most of my weight right as I'm snowboarding. That coupled with playing soccer, it started to bother me about 10 years ago. I I was with Kaiser Permanente at the time. They wouldn't do an mri. They did an x-ray. I didn't really get the care I should have at the time. I should have found a different doctor to get an mri and realized I was starting to grind away my cartilage. I continued to play about five more years up until, up until 2018 when I absolutely could not play soccer anymore. I stumbled off the field and could, and then it bothered my walking. So not only could I not run now, I couldn't walk properly and my gate was shortened.

It started bothering my back, et cetera. So a few years of wearing a brace and trying to do different rehabs and things seeing different doctors, it became clear that I would need some type of knee replacement. I went to kind of call 'em conventional doctors and I was told I would need a full knee replacement, but I couldn't get it now, cuz I'm only 58. Maybe in 10 or 15 years I could get a full knee replacement. And until then, hey, just, you know, we'll work with you and teach you how to walk with, you know, pain in your cartilage in, in your knee. So I looked up can I run again after a knee replacement in Google? I, that was my Google search. Can I run again after a knee replacement? And Dr. Stone popped up San Francisco.

I started looking at the website at the testimonials and there were several patients that postop were running again in my age group again, I'm 58. And so I, I got very excited. I contacted Dr. Stone. I went and got the mri. So I showed up here prepared, and then he showed me immediately, day one, what a unicompartmental knee replacement would look like on the medial side of my right knee. It all very logical, only replaced the part that's bothering you. Not the entire thing makes sense to me. And so we worked on a, on a plan and I had the surgery on October 19th, 2021. And here I am, six months post-op. And I was just in Philadelphia and I was inspired cuz it was around six months after the surgery. So I ran the rocky Steps with the Rocky theme music like Sylvester Stallone, and it felt pretty good.

My knee is is working again, and I'm still doing my physical therapy, my rehab which I've been doing diligently since the surgery. And Dr. Stone and his staff have been terrific. I travel quite a bit on business, and so I have my workouts printed out and I use 'em when I'm in hotel rooms and gyms and other places. And I just keep, you know, making sure I'm doing my workouts, my physical therapy, getting stronger in the right knee. And I'm excited eventually to get back out on the soccer field and running again. So just have to keep working on it.

Actually look forward to steps. I'm proud of myself when I can go up steps and go down steps without the pain. I know I've made steps, you know, in my rehab. I know I've improved in my rehab. Now when I pick up my son, who's now two and a half, he's getting bigger now, no problem. Pick him up, hoist him up on my shoulders, walk with him, walk up and down steps. I'm not, I'm not concerned anymore about the weight of my son. And then kind of the next goal for me is as he gets bigger, to be able to run and play soccer with him and coach him in soccer in a couple years. So that's one thing I think I'm gonna be able to get there with with doing the rehab. So the rehab start day one do everything they tell you to do.

And I was coming here at first every day of the week, and then three days a week with the rehab professionals and physical therapies here at Dr. Stone's clinic are amazing, great people. They're very interested in, in the process and getting to know me as a, as an individual and, and and, you know, I, again, as I, I would travel, I would print out my exercises, take them with me, and then have them, you know, in different time zones and different places and always doing my, my rehab in the morning before I would leave the hotel room, I was in a big skier and snowboarded before for spring break, just two weeks ago I was up skiing up at Lake Tahoe Squa Valley. They now call it Palisade Tahoe. Five days of skiing and no pain at all.

So day one, I was just out there by myself, just getting back used to my skis, et cetera. Day two, I was meeting a friend and he charges down the mountain and we used to ski together and he's been going all season, right? It was my day two, and I was able to follow him down the mountain and keep up. And I'm, I'm hitting my turns. It was just groom slopes, steep room slopes and hitting my turns and just, I'm waiting for the pain. And it never really came all day. I just kept following down the mountain. There was no issues at all on my skis. That was amazing. I've not yet tried snowboarding yet. The conditions were not ideal for that. I like to snowboard when there's some powder, when there's a little more deep snow, a little softer. So I'll try next season.

Not a problem, but, so that's great. Skiing was great and then now I'm back on my road bicycle climbing up the Berkeley Hills and I'm back, back doing the steep hills. I used to climb, kind of all the difficult stuff. At first I was using routes that would get me up the hill at more shallow less steep slopes. And now I'm going right back to the steepest hills. I was climbing before. Takes me longer, a little more winded. I don't have the conditioning, but I have the parts I, my, my knee works. I have the, you know, the capability to go climb that hill the way I used to do some, some of those things. I'm checking the boxes, right? Climbing the hills again on the bicycle, skiing, snowboarding. And then eventually, you know, the hardest I know will be getting back out and running and playing soccer.

I'm gonna keep working hard to do that. I just want to acknowledge Dr. Stone's thoughts on, on doing the uni compartment knee replacement for someone like me. I'm, I'm not a doctor, but I'm, I'm try to use logic and it's just so logical, right? So logical to replace the components that need replacing, replace the area of the knee that is bothering you, right? Not the entire full knee replacement. That never made any sense to me why the outside of my knee, which was fine. Why would I replace that? And so I just I, I acknowledge Dr. Stone's procedures. I, I had ground away so much of my cartilage and my meniscus that he couldn't use. I, I know he does some cartilage growth bio knee type of procedures where it would use my own tissues and, and, but I didn't, I came too late.

I didn't have enough tissues left. So I would encourage others, you know, when you have pain in your knees or, or other parts come early and get the MRI and, and, you know, try to get to it early. I let it go for about five years and I ground it away. So I've had to use the full component replacements. But again, I've got kind of like a bionic knee now. I know those parts, the cobalt chrome and the, and the titanium. They're not gonna wear away. And I just need to build the muscles around it and get it back to where I was.