My Bilateral Knee Replacement

The back story.  In 1978 I was playing football for the American Fork Caveman football team.  We were playing Cedar City in the old rodeo grounds.  The field was sand and grass and a terrible place to play.  I was playing right defensive tackle and was having a great game. On one play I was called to run an inside stunt and beat my guy and had a clear shot at the QB as he set up to pass when a little blocking back put his helmet directly into my right knee.  I felt and others said they heard a loud “pop” and I went down.  It is few of the football plays I remember with great clarity because of the obvious devastation. My entire lateral meniscus was popped out of my knee joint (under the skin)  and into my knee joint.  I really couldn’t bend my knee.  When I jumped up, I went down again in pain.   And then got up and hobbled off the field.  Back in that they, before MRIs and good medical care there was not a lot to do. Especially at that point in time they had no idea what was wrong.  My knee was just packed in ice and I had a seat of my own on the front of the bus and I took the long ride home.  X-rays with dies injected into my knee did not show anything.  So Dr. Martin, doing his best, simply put me in a brace and I hobbled around.  After a couple weeks of no improvement I managed to get in to see Dr. Robert Metcalf who was the only Dr. in the state of Utah doing ortho scopic knee surgery.  He had just come back from some time in Japan where he had been fully trained and was actually writing a book on the subject.  So 4 to 5 weeks later I finally had knee surgery and he pulled out my entire lateral meniscus.  He told me that the image of it was actually used in a textbook that he wrote.  He was optimistic about my ability to play football and had me outfitted with, what was then, a state of the art Lenox Hill de-rotation brace.  I remember the coaches seeing it and wondering how I could even function as a football player.  In retrospect it’s rather funny because almost every college interior lineman wears a similar brace now.  It didn’t slow me down at all and gave me a sense of confidence that I wouldn’t reinjure my knee and it did protect it significantly. It was still a pain to wear because they weren’t as good as they are now.  I can still run a 4.8 forty and had a great season my senior year as a Caption and was recruited to play junior college football.  Where I did until the first full game where I reinjured my knee on a vicious block which completely upended me.  Three surgeries later in the season that was well spent, I was done with my football career.  During the next few years I would have two or three more surgeries to remove the medial meniscus as it deteriorated and broke apart.  And that was my bad knee.  My good knee started having problems and eventually most of the meniscus was removed from it.   Not much of my behavior was affected by my knees until I was in my 50s and I started realizing the pain and swelling was affecting my quality of life.  Meaning I just couldn’t do the things I wanted to do.  Constant pain and swelling.  On a trip with my wife and daughter in London, coming down a double-decker bus stairway I twisted my left knee in hut it.  And walking around Italy became a chore.  I knew I could go about 7000 to 8000 steps and still be able to walk the next day but beyond that there was no way.  For the next few months, I was unable to comfortably sleep at night without making sure my knees were bent.  I could not straighten either knee out, nor did I have more range of motion that a 90° angle on my right knee.   I went to my doctor convinced that I had Cartledge stopping the full range of motion.  But from MRIs it was clear that my problem was I was just bone-on-bone.  I was still not on board with having artificial knees.

On a hike up Machu Picchu Montana, but even more so on the way down, I made the decision to have knee replacement surgery because my good knee actually hurt more than my bad knee.  It was the most excruciating hike of my life and to this day I’m surprised I was able to actually do it.  Someday I’d like to go back and hike it again, and actually enjoy it.  So I made the decision to go under the knife because there were no other options because I was completely bone-on-bone on my right knee and most of my left knee as well.