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Patient TestimonialWilliam, ADVANCE® Unicompartmental Knee Recipient
He was almost 70 years old then. So he did what he had to do. Switched to bicycling. The knees still hurt but not as bad. Not badly enough to keep him and his wife of 54 years, Jan, from taking a 1,300-mile bike ride from Ft. Morgan, Colo., to Findlay, Ohio, in the summer of 2000. He was 71 and she was in her late 60s. “That was our personal Mt. Everest, I suppose,” William said.
Three months after surgery William and his wife spent a month near Tucson, Ariz., and rode bicycles about 15 or 20 miles a day, totaling 300 miles. William said he no longer has to think about his knees, and he feels a whole new sense of mobility. He exercises daily on a treadmill, continues to ride the bicycle, and said he was thinking about getting back to playing some tennis, which he used to do. “I feel like I can do anything now,” William said. These results are specific to this individual only. Individual results and activity levels after surgery vary and depend on many factors including age, weight and prior activity level.
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“I used to run a lot,” said William, making an understatement. He logged 20,000 miles
between 1977 and 1997, and then his knees started hurting.
They averaged about 38 miles a day
and the ride lasted five weeks with three days of rest. It was a pilgrimage of sorts,
a return home to where they grew up in northwest Ohio and where he worked for 34 years
for the Marathon Oil Co. They retired to Colorado but there was no slowing down.So it was
probably not the years but the mileage that finally wore out his knees to the point he
needed to trade them in for new ones. In November 2004, William received partial
replacement of both knees.
“I had been riding without pain pretty well, but I was having a hard time walking
and I couldn’t lift anything heavy anymore,” William, now 76, said. “I was limping
and I had become kind of bow legged.” There was pain after the surgery and
during the physical therapy, he said, but the results are very well worth it.
He gives credit to his surgeon, Dr. Michael Dohm of Grand Junction.
“For one thing, I’m not bow legged anymore and in fact I gained about an inch in height.
So it was like cosmetic surgery,” he said with a laugh. “The important thing is that I don’t
have any knee pain. I couldn’t be more satisfied.”
