health

Time for a new knee

Doug Mahugh

25 Oct 2024 • 4 min read

Nancy taking a walk in front of my surgeon's office in Issaquah before our appointment.

My right knee has been a problem for a long time. When I was 19 years old, I fell off a scaffold at a construction project on the Yakama Indian Reservation and tore it up good, resulting in a complicated surgery at the old Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital that left me with some missing meniscus (the cartilage that acts as a shock absorber in the knee joint), a realigned kneecap, and an 8-inch scar that's still visible today.

Since then, I've had good knee days and bad knee days. Good years and bad ones. I learned long ago that keeping my legs strong adds stability that helps reduce knee pain, and that's why I've spent a lot more time working my legs than other parts of my body over the years. In recent years that's gone pretty well, and last year after retiring I took several big hikes and was very pleased to find that knee pain wasn't a limiting factor in general.

This year I had ambitions for another good hiking year, but it didn't work out that way. I took a fun hike down near Palm Springs in early May, and then a few days later I took a fall at a friend's house due to a combination of clumsiness, stupidity, and alcohol. (Sorry about your TV stand, Scott!)

That fall bruised my back, which in hindsight distracted me from the fact it also torqued my knee. I've fallen and reinjured that knee countless times before, but this time was different – even after weeks of ice packs, heating pads, stretching, and anti-inflammatory drugs, it didn't seem to be getting back to normal.

A typical example of the long painful history of my right knee: standing in a hotel room in Phuket, Thailand after taking a fall on some slippery rocks at the beach in 2007. By the next day it had swollen up enough that I wound up going home in a wheelchair, but after a couple of months I had recovered. This year, though, I seem to have reached the point where I can no longer recover from these sorts of mishaps.

In July of this year, after it had become clear that my knee wasn't recovering this time, I made an appointment with my favorite orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Bruckner of Proliance Sports Medicine in the Seattle area. Dr. Bruckner gave me a new lease on life when he replaced both of my hips in 2015, and for three months I've been looking forward to discussing my knee with him.

Yesterday morning, that long-awaited appointment finally happened. Nancy and I drove 600 miles to Seattle the day before, spent the night at a motel, and were at Proliance's Issaquah facility a full two hours early, where we took long walks around the parking lot before and after sunrise.

While walking Nancy along this hillside behind the Proliance parking lot, I remembered walking Jamie and Alice here on the day I met Dr. Bruckner in July 2015 and decided to get both hips replaced.

It was great to see Dr. Bruckner and discuss the situation with him. The arthritis in that knee had grown much worse in the 9 years since he last studied X-rays of it, and his written diagnosis described it as "severe tricompartmental osteoarthritis." In discussing the X-rays with me, he used smaller words: "that right kneecap is a mess."

We discussed all sorts of details, but the bottom line is that I'll be getting my right knee replaced in late May 2025.

It was an easy decision to make, because I want to have more great hiking seasons like last year, and that clearly won't happen with the knee I have. If I just wanted to take it easy and act my age, I could probably get by with medications for pain and inflammation, but I'm not ready to give up on hiking with the dogs.

Between now and then, I'll be working out to get as strong as possible for my recovery, and I'll be losing some weight as well. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to work with the Proliance team again, and I'm expecting this process to go as smoothly as my hip replacements did. As I did then, I plan to push hard on the things I can control: physical therapy, exercise, nutrition, and not falling!