Editor’s note: If you are an orthopedic surgeon, a surgical nurse, a sports medicine specialist or anybody else in the medical field, you might want to skip this story. You will want to edit my copy and rewrite most of it to sound like the New England Journal of Medicine which uses the correct terminology, does a better job of explaining things, and so forth. Basically, this write-up is me repeating what my knee told me.
My left leg would really like to have a new knee.
The knee that’s there now got old and it’s not doing its job.
It’s still going with me for walks and it’s still bicycling and skiing, but not in a robust, comprehensive way. And, if I sit down for too long, it stops working altogether. It whines and whimpers and wants ice and ibuprofen. Especially at night when I’m trying to sleep.
So, I went shopping for a new knee. Actually, I went shopping for a new doctor. My last sawbones gave me a new right knee and it’s been working like a champ.
But my last sawbones and I didn’t see eye-to-eye. We were good buddies at first because I didn’t know any better. I inherited him from the previous guy who installed my new hips.
Then that guy retired and handed me off to his replacement. And that’s when I got into the knee surgery business. As a patient.
When it comes to surgery, knees are in the big leagues structurally speaking. We’re only talking about bones and joints, not soft tissue. Anyway, knee surgery is not as profound as neck or back surgery, but it’s still something to be reckoned with.
And there are a couple of ways to do knee surgery. The hard way and the easy way. I will spare you the gory details but suffice it to say, the hard way involves cutting through all the crap that the knee needs in order to do its job (quadricep muscle and tendon and a couple of ligaments) while the easy way is shoving this stuff to one side or another so the new knee can be installed.
But I didn’t know any of this the first time around so I went with the surgeon who did traditional surgery, which is the hard way. And the reason it’s the hard way is the quad stuff that gets cut takes a while (Google says 10 to 12 weeks) to heal and the healing process hurts like the devil.
When I called in for the authorized refill on my pain relievers, the abrupt medical assistant who wasn’t there the day they taught “bedside manner” wanted to know what my pain level was. She was unimpressed when I told her it was a “10” and it felt like someone was holding a blow torch to my knee. She wanted to know what else I had been doing to manage my pain. I told her I was doing shots of tequila.
Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, this time around I huddled with my knee-surgery peeps and got advice on pain management. People who’ve had Total Knee Replacement (TKR) bond as soon as they spot the scar. (Of course, it has to be during the summer and be shorts weather.)
I discovered that minimally invasive knee surgery (shoving stuff aside, not slicing through it) was the way to go and then I went shopping for a minimally invasive doctor.
My traditional knee surgeon advised me that the only doctors doing minimally invasive surgery are the ones who aren’t skilled enough to do traditional surgery and who have to rely on a robot to help them.
My minimally invasive guy had a different story involving more training and a more advanced procedure using a robotic arm that maps the knee joint 67 different ways. And lest we forget, there’s less pain during recovery.
So, I got them together on a Zoom call that I turned into a Dueling Surgeons YouTube video. No, that didn’t happen. Instead, I went with Plan B and soothingly told my left knee that this time around would be better.
Hah! Famous last words.
Here’s a clue: Am I sitting here with my new knee, recovering with ice cream and a dog? No, I am not. I’m sitting here bending your ear about what didn’t happen.
My journey to the operating room started out okay. I used a couple of referrals and got a surgeon lined up, and got a surgery date scheduled a couple of months hence.
Then things went sideways. My surgeon decided to leave his medical group so as a going-away present he got re-booked on surgeries to cram them all in before he left.
Suddenly, I went from two months until surgery to two weeks. The 14-day countdown clock was ticking as I hurried around and got my clearances (paperwork and tests to make sure the rest of me is in good enough working order to “go under the knife” as they say). I was at T-minus 7 when I got word that my surgery was cancelled.
Holy whiplash, Batman!
Someone read my file for a second or third or first time and realized that I had a gel shot still percolating away in my system and thus wasn’t eligible for surgery. It wasn’t a problem until they changed the surgery date. So no, two wrongs don’t make a right.
So here we are. Surgery. Sooner surgery. No surgery.
That means I am ace-bandaging my knee when it goes to the gym and waiting for my preferred surgeon to get settled with his new medical group and start taking patients again.
I asked Dr. Knee Fixer if he’d met his new operating team or seen his new operating room and he told me he wasn’t changing the hospital or the operating team, just the medical group. That was good to know, because I was going to further delay scheduling my surgery if he needed to adjust to a new place and new people.
Meanwhile my big wall calendar for the last couple of months is a symphony of erasures and write-ins. There are days that are blank and days that are double-booked.
And like my old knee keeps telling me, “Life is just one damn thing after another.”
Or maybe that was Mark Twain.
The Upstory 