jengofet71
new member
I am a US Army Veteran, female, aged 37 years 9 months and 7 days. I suffered , at the time (January 19th 2002), what was considered to be a non-serious injury to my knee. However, after a week oif continued inflamation, increased pain, and just a general knowing that there was something potentially a bit more serious wrong with my knee, I finally got an MRI on January 26th, 2002.
The radiologist who read that inital MRI said there was nothing wrong with my knee other than some "degenerative conditions) and that everything would be fine if I just rested and waited for what must have been just a sprain to heal. That really makes a person feel better until they go out and try to play tennis (jut a light game with just me hitting balls against a long piece of flatwood) and on the first sidestep my knee pops, and it is like a worthless hunk of meat and bone just laying there with nothing to do.
Since that time I have been through 3 Arthroscopic Surgeries and two major surgeries on my left knee. I am convinced that the fourth surgery, the :High Tibial OSteotomy" was the worst decision I made to have that surgery. It made an already pretty jacked up leg even more difficult to deal with.
I am now a the point where I can do NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING with it. I just had another surgery whose aim from the beginning was not to fix anything but only to take out the hardware from the High Tibial Osteotomy. My new Orthopedic Surgeon who works only part time as a Orthopedic Surgeon at Tripler Army Hospital is, to put it nicely, a complete idiot when it comes to listening to patients or have anything constructive to say. I will be honest.
I do suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to my military service and that is all I am going to say about that. However, it seems that whenever I see this "doctor" all he wants to deal with is "Why do you have PTSD?" "Well, then what is that all about?". "Well, at least you got free medical coverage for life and you are 100 percent disabled or else you might have some PROBLEMS!!!"...hardeefrigginHAR. He is a complete idiot.
The appointment I had with him just prior to having my surgery I had to be escorted to my appointment because at that time I was inpatient at Tripler Army Hospital because I had not slept in five days. I was really full of anxiety and things were just messed up (my mother had committed suicide only a year prior to my hospitalization so the anniversary of her death might have had something to do with it...I do not know for sure.) So I had wound up being hospitalized on the Department of veteran's Affairs Psychiatric Ward. I knew things were going to be a problem just because of other things had said about my PTSD from earlier appointments.
Sure 'nuf, he did not disappoint. He told me that I would never make it through a knee replacement because I was so "fragile" emotionally. Right I am sooooooooooooo FRAGILE. I served in the military for almost 14 years and I was airborne qualified, a squad leader by the time I had my two years time in service. Was a corporal for only a month until I found out the month after that I had the points to get promoted to E-5/SGT, one in a long line of ranks as a non-commissioned officer.
And all this was happening just weeks prior to my 2 year time in service requirement which on promotion day I would HAVE....I have run around the total Island of Oahu TWICE for charity (before I injured my leg, also have been to four combat zones (well, Five but Kuwait does not need to be counted twice/ plus that was just the jumping off place for the real horrors of war which is why I am dedicating my life now to ending war for good).....I served in the first gulf war and I served in the second.....In the Second (more well-known by its catchy title "The Global War on Terrorism"one tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan)
I did not find out that the first MRI on my record prior to being sent to Afghanistan showed more than just a simple degenerative change"....it was not until after I returned and could hardly bend my leg at all in the mornings without working it and massaging it for about two hours to get it to loosen up before I could even get in the shower. And the terrain in A'stan only made things so very much worse. Walking in that rap wll tear up your feet, akles and whatever else you need in order to walk.
What I need to know is quite simple. I need someone who will email to me the latest research on doing Total Knee Replacements on younger patients....younger as in 37 years old younger...that as stated previously is my age.
Every doctor from the Army to the Department of Veterans Affairs has said that I need a total knee replacement...they just refuse to do it saying that it is never done and that I would be in there 5 years later to get a new knee because i would wear them out to fast. Now all this is in contradiction to the very minimal research I have done online myself.
However I need some more proof that these TKR's for younger patients are done and they do in fact work out pretty well. I need something that will weigh the cost of doing the surgery against the cost of me becoming a real witch to deal with if it turns out that I do not get my knee fixed and end up with secondary illnesses due to the sedentary lifestyle that often comes with this type of injury. I already have to walk with a cane at the age of 37, but my knee just gives out whenever it feels like it has been used to much and I never really know when that is going to happen so I just always walk with the cane so I can at least try to catch myself in time before I take a nasty spill. I fell down stairs four times just last year, all those falls had me ending up in the Emergency Room. The worst fall caused a cracked clavicle and three broken ribs. AND THIS IS HOW I AM SUPPOSED TO LIVE UNTIL I AM RE-CONSIDERED THE APPRPRIATE AGE (Somwhere around 55 -60 from what I have heard) TO GET A TOTAL KNEE REPLACEMENT??????????
What is wrong with this system and why will they not fix what they broke. It as not until my EXIT physical when I was getting out of the Army in early 2006, that an Orthopedic Surgeon happened to re-look at the 2002 MRI and said, "how come you have had a completely torn Anterior Cruciate ligament and no one ever did anything about it, since this MRI was done way back in 2002? I told him I had no idea but that was why I was including knee pain in my exit physical questionnaire because I was having more pain plus I could no longer completely straighten out my knee either.
He told me that if the first bone headed Army radiologist has read the 2002 MRI correctly and given the fact that I was in great shape, they could have done a ACL reconstruction that probably would have faired very well with the right rehabilitation. However by 2006, that time had passed. There was no ACL reconstruction to be had. Since I had continued to walk for miles, run and do occasionally other strenuous activity with my leg, too many changes had occurred in the joint itself for any kind of AL reconstruction to have any effect. It would most certainly fail I was told.
Then I was scheduled with a slew of other Orthopedic surgeons as they tried to determine how well they thought I deserved to walk for the rest of my life. That is when this reservist Orthopedic Surgeon only at Tripler doing his yearly service committment, pipes up during one meeting saying a "High Tibial Osteotomy" would solve all my problems. All this guy did was end up botching the procedure up so badly that I could bend my leg even less, i kept getting sores from one of the FIVE two and a half inch long screws they used to bolt the plate over the tibia which was to hold all the cadaver bone they had to fill in the gaps from when they took out nearly 3 inches of MY BONE, with the hope that it would straighten out my joint well enough to allow me to completely straighten my leg and maybe even make things even better than that....so I let them do the surgery.
It was the most horrible experience I had had in a while. I mean and I have a LONG list of pretty horrid stuff that I have been through. This High Tibial Osteotomy landed me in a long term care home for rehab patients and I had rehab twice a week. I wound up wheelchair bound for nearly 11 months.
No one it seemed in the entire VA physical therapy department had ever worked with anyone who had ever had this surgery done so they had no idea how to rehabilitate my leg....basically would sit on the Phys Rehab office twice a week while the therapist tried to figure out a plan attack,,,which they never did. I basically just kept trying to walk....my leg would give out and I would fall and then I would try to walk the next day...until finally, I guess, the cadaver bone was strong enough for me to walk. I signed out of that Dept. Of Vet. Aff>'s hell hole the very next day after I was able to walk down the entire length.
Anyway, my knee is getting worse, my attitude sucks because i cannot do ANYTHING i used to do which would give me joy in my life. I am 37 years old and am being told that i should just be happy, that I get to retire basically at 38 and live off the disability from the VA and from Social Security forever.
Now, I understand the allure of that type of life but believe you me, it gets pretty daggone terrible after a while. It is boring and there is little to do. I hate my life and I hate the thought of living like this for another 15 to 20 years or whenever they finally decide that I am the right age for this total knee replacement to happen. Of course BY THEN, I will be morbidly obese from lack of exercise most likely, I will have adult onset Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease and all the other wonderful diseases that plague my family but from which I have managed to remain immune since i live as a vegetarian and try to eat macrobiotically and do all the right things. However, I feel like I am losing hope and I am feeling for the first time ever in my life like just giving up and eating about 40 cheeseburgers because why? Well...BECAUSE HEY...WHATS THE POINT OF BEING HEALTHY?
Maybe I am feeling a little pitiful and pathetic but I must admit that up until my last appointment with the latest hatchet doctor, I have maintained a pretty calm demeanor but this guy pushed me over the edge on Friday and now I have to figure out what to do.
Where can I find THE BEST RESEARCH AND RESULTS OF THAT RESEARCH to show these idiots so that they know that Total knee Replacements are done on people my age...heck I even read one case study where a replacement was done on a 12 year old and by the age of 16 he was already running, very slowly and very easily, but running still plus he was taking long walks in the moutains, doing some pretty hardcore cycling and alot of other things. The only things he was left out of were sports like football and soccer and basketball where you have to make thoie hard "cutting up/downfield" types of moves, know what I mean? But hey he had pretty much everything back and with the look at his latest MRI, his knee was still going as good as it had on the day they put it into the kid. The doctor said the kid could get 15 to maybe even twenty-years out of that first knee. THat doctor also said that it was not an unusual case as there were many people getting a lot of longevity out of these new artificial knees as they were being made out of way more strong and capable material.
So basically I am getting lied to by a bunch of military thug officers and whats worse is that they are doctors. SO I can do nothing. I cannot see anyone outside that ortho clinic unless the VA approves it through their "non-VA services" office which is like trying to get bill made into a law i Washington. You end up putting in about 4 requests before finally somebody looks at the thing, and then that is only so they can stamp a big fat NO across it and send you a letter regretting to inform me that they once again ARE REFUSING TO TAKE CARE OF AN INJURY THAT THEY THEMSELVES HAVE MADE HORRIBLE AND MORESO AS TIME GOES BY.
So agin, if you can offer me any ideas on where to research about younger patients getting TKR's and how it has worked out, I would really appreciate it. I am not very good at asking for help but I have reached the end of my rope with this knee issue and so I decided to come on this forum which is read by at least some of you who know what you are talking about, I could vent a little bit and then maybe one of you who knows a little bit more about this stuff can tell me where to do my best research.
So what do you say? Any of you who would help would be doing me so much of a favor you have NO IDEA. I do not want to retire at 37 (I will be 38 in November) years old. I have things I want to do like finish my Health Services Administration degree and work with my friend Dave's sort of like non-profit "Doctors without Borders" thing. Only we would not only be going overseas but would spend more than half our volunteer time each year working with hospitals to offer services to people who cannot get it. On our missions oversea's we would be spending most of our time in our own hemisphere in South America primarily trying to help people get the care they need but sometimes cannot get because there is no dentist (per se) except for the one down the jungle trail about 700 miles away.
That is what I want to do with my life and I need a functional knee to do it. But no one within the VA systen will listen to a word I say. So if any of you can help me so I can walk in to that clinic with fistfull of paper with highly regarded research that shows that doing total knee replacements on young peope like me is more of an investment than it is a loss. If any of you can just help me out I would appreciate it soi incredibly much. You can email me at [email protected]....I have set up an email just for this request and I promise every single email will be read.....
Thank you in advance to any of you who can help me out. I do not know how I will ever be able to repay you but I ill promise to try. Thank you so much for allowing me to vent here and also for listening and hopefully having some sort of answers for me eventually. Again, it is not like you are helping someone who has thing going on. I have plenty going on and plenty for my future already planned out. So, I promise I would not be a waste of space!! I promise all of you as well.
Aloha
jengofet71 (if the spelling is crazy it was because I was so angry
while writing this that I probably mispelled more than just a few)
The radiologist who read that inital MRI said there was nothing wrong with my knee other than some "degenerative conditions) and that everything would be fine if I just rested and waited for what must have been just a sprain to heal. That really makes a person feel better until they go out and try to play tennis (jut a light game with just me hitting balls against a long piece of flatwood) and on the first sidestep my knee pops, and it is like a worthless hunk of meat and bone just laying there with nothing to do.
Since that time I have been through 3 Arthroscopic Surgeries and two major surgeries on my left knee. I am convinced that the fourth surgery, the :High Tibial OSteotomy" was the worst decision I made to have that surgery. It made an already pretty jacked up leg even more difficult to deal with.
I am now a the point where I can do NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING with it. I just had another surgery whose aim from the beginning was not to fix anything but only to take out the hardware from the High Tibial Osteotomy. My new Orthopedic Surgeon who works only part time as a Orthopedic Surgeon at Tripler Army Hospital is, to put it nicely, a complete idiot when it comes to listening to patients or have anything constructive to say. I will be honest.
I do suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to my military service and that is all I am going to say about that. However, it seems that whenever I see this "doctor" all he wants to deal with is "Why do you have PTSD?" "Well, then what is that all about?". "Well, at least you got free medical coverage for life and you are 100 percent disabled or else you might have some PROBLEMS!!!"...hardeefrigginHAR. He is a complete idiot.
The appointment I had with him just prior to having my surgery I had to be escorted to my appointment because at that time I was inpatient at Tripler Army Hospital because I had not slept in five days. I was really full of anxiety and things were just messed up (my mother had committed suicide only a year prior to my hospitalization so the anniversary of her death might have had something to do with it...I do not know for sure.) So I had wound up being hospitalized on the Department of veteran's Affairs Psychiatric Ward. I knew things were going to be a problem just because of other things had said about my PTSD from earlier appointments.
Sure 'nuf, he did not disappoint. He told me that I would never make it through a knee replacement because I was so "fragile" emotionally. Right I am sooooooooooooo FRAGILE. I served in the military for almost 14 years and I was airborne qualified, a squad leader by the time I had my two years time in service. Was a corporal for only a month until I found out the month after that I had the points to get promoted to E-5/SGT, one in a long line of ranks as a non-commissioned officer.
And all this was happening just weeks prior to my 2 year time in service requirement which on promotion day I would HAVE....I have run around the total Island of Oahu TWICE for charity (before I injured my leg, also have been to four combat zones (well, Five but Kuwait does not need to be counted twice/ plus that was just the jumping off place for the real horrors of war which is why I am dedicating my life now to ending war for good).....I served in the first gulf war and I served in the second.....In the Second (more well-known by its catchy title "The Global War on Terrorism"one tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan)
I did not find out that the first MRI on my record prior to being sent to Afghanistan showed more than just a simple degenerative change"....it was not until after I returned and could hardly bend my leg at all in the mornings without working it and massaging it for about two hours to get it to loosen up before I could even get in the shower. And the terrain in A'stan only made things so very much worse. Walking in that rap wll tear up your feet, akles and whatever else you need in order to walk.
What I need to know is quite simple. I need someone who will email to me the latest research on doing Total Knee Replacements on younger patients....younger as in 37 years old younger...that as stated previously is my age.
Every doctor from the Army to the Department of Veterans Affairs has said that I need a total knee replacement...they just refuse to do it saying that it is never done and that I would be in there 5 years later to get a new knee because i would wear them out to fast. Now all this is in contradiction to the very minimal research I have done online myself.
However I need some more proof that these TKR's for younger patients are done and they do in fact work out pretty well. I need something that will weigh the cost of doing the surgery against the cost of me becoming a real witch to deal with if it turns out that I do not get my knee fixed and end up with secondary illnesses due to the sedentary lifestyle that often comes with this type of injury. I already have to walk with a cane at the age of 37, but my knee just gives out whenever it feels like it has been used to much and I never really know when that is going to happen so I just always walk with the cane so I can at least try to catch myself in time before I take a nasty spill. I fell down stairs four times just last year, all those falls had me ending up in the Emergency Room. The worst fall caused a cracked clavicle and three broken ribs. AND THIS IS HOW I AM SUPPOSED TO LIVE UNTIL I AM RE-CONSIDERED THE APPRPRIATE AGE (Somwhere around 55 -60 from what I have heard) TO GET A TOTAL KNEE REPLACEMENT??????????
What is wrong with this system and why will they not fix what they broke. It as not until my EXIT physical when I was getting out of the Army in early 2006, that an Orthopedic Surgeon happened to re-look at the 2002 MRI and said, "how come you have had a completely torn Anterior Cruciate ligament and no one ever did anything about it, since this MRI was done way back in 2002? I told him I had no idea but that was why I was including knee pain in my exit physical questionnaire because I was having more pain plus I could no longer completely straighten out my knee either.
He told me that if the first bone headed Army radiologist has read the 2002 MRI correctly and given the fact that I was in great shape, they could have done a ACL reconstruction that probably would have faired very well with the right rehabilitation. However by 2006, that time had passed. There was no ACL reconstruction to be had. Since I had continued to walk for miles, run and do occasionally other strenuous activity with my leg, too many changes had occurred in the joint itself for any kind of AL reconstruction to have any effect. It would most certainly fail I was told.
Then I was scheduled with a slew of other Orthopedic surgeons as they tried to determine how well they thought I deserved to walk for the rest of my life. That is when this reservist Orthopedic Surgeon only at Tripler doing his yearly service committment, pipes up during one meeting saying a "High Tibial Osteotomy" would solve all my problems. All this guy did was end up botching the procedure up so badly that I could bend my leg even less, i kept getting sores from one of the FIVE two and a half inch long screws they used to bolt the plate over the tibia which was to hold all the cadaver bone they had to fill in the gaps from when they took out nearly 3 inches of MY BONE, with the hope that it would straighten out my joint well enough to allow me to completely straighten my leg and maybe even make things even better than that....so I let them do the surgery.
It was the most horrible experience I had had in a while. I mean and I have a LONG list of pretty horrid stuff that I have been through. This High Tibial Osteotomy landed me in a long term care home for rehab patients and I had rehab twice a week. I wound up wheelchair bound for nearly 11 months.
No one it seemed in the entire VA physical therapy department had ever worked with anyone who had ever had this surgery done so they had no idea how to rehabilitate my leg....basically would sit on the Phys Rehab office twice a week while the therapist tried to figure out a plan attack,,,which they never did. I basically just kept trying to walk....my leg would give out and I would fall and then I would try to walk the next day...until finally, I guess, the cadaver bone was strong enough for me to walk. I signed out of that Dept. Of Vet. Aff>'s hell hole the very next day after I was able to walk down the entire length.
Anyway, my knee is getting worse, my attitude sucks because i cannot do ANYTHING i used to do which would give me joy in my life. I am 37 years old and am being told that i should just be happy, that I get to retire basically at 38 and live off the disability from the VA and from Social Security forever.
Now, I understand the allure of that type of life but believe you me, it gets pretty daggone terrible after a while. It is boring and there is little to do. I hate my life and I hate the thought of living like this for another 15 to 20 years or whenever they finally decide that I am the right age for this total knee replacement to happen. Of course BY THEN, I will be morbidly obese from lack of exercise most likely, I will have adult onset Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease and all the other wonderful diseases that plague my family but from which I have managed to remain immune since i live as a vegetarian and try to eat macrobiotically and do all the right things. However, I feel like I am losing hope and I am feeling for the first time ever in my life like just giving up and eating about 40 cheeseburgers because why? Well...BECAUSE HEY...WHATS THE POINT OF BEING HEALTHY?
Maybe I am feeling a little pitiful and pathetic but I must admit that up until my last appointment with the latest hatchet doctor, I have maintained a pretty calm demeanor but this guy pushed me over the edge on Friday and now I have to figure out what to do.
Where can I find THE BEST RESEARCH AND RESULTS OF THAT RESEARCH to show these idiots so that they know that Total knee Replacements are done on people my age...heck I even read one case study where a replacement was done on a 12 year old and by the age of 16 he was already running, very slowly and very easily, but running still plus he was taking long walks in the moutains, doing some pretty hardcore cycling and alot of other things. The only things he was left out of were sports like football and soccer and basketball where you have to make thoie hard "cutting up/downfield" types of moves, know what I mean? But hey he had pretty much everything back and with the look at his latest MRI, his knee was still going as good as it had on the day they put it into the kid. The doctor said the kid could get 15 to maybe even twenty-years out of that first knee. THat doctor also said that it was not an unusual case as there were many people getting a lot of longevity out of these new artificial knees as they were being made out of way more strong and capable material.
So basically I am getting lied to by a bunch of military thug officers and whats worse is that they are doctors. SO I can do nothing. I cannot see anyone outside that ortho clinic unless the VA approves it through their "non-VA services" office which is like trying to get bill made into a law i Washington. You end up putting in about 4 requests before finally somebody looks at the thing, and then that is only so they can stamp a big fat NO across it and send you a letter regretting to inform me that they once again ARE REFUSING TO TAKE CARE OF AN INJURY THAT THEY THEMSELVES HAVE MADE HORRIBLE AND MORESO AS TIME GOES BY.
So agin, if you can offer me any ideas on where to research about younger patients getting TKR's and how it has worked out, I would really appreciate it. I am not very good at asking for help but I have reached the end of my rope with this knee issue and so I decided to come on this forum which is read by at least some of you who know what you are talking about, I could vent a little bit and then maybe one of you who knows a little bit more about this stuff can tell me where to do my best research.
So what do you say? Any of you who would help would be doing me so much of a favor you have NO IDEA. I do not want to retire at 37 (I will be 38 in November) years old. I have things I want to do like finish my Health Services Administration degree and work with my friend Dave's sort of like non-profit "Doctors without Borders" thing. Only we would not only be going overseas but would spend more than half our volunteer time each year working with hospitals to offer services to people who cannot get it. On our missions oversea's we would be spending most of our time in our own hemisphere in South America primarily trying to help people get the care they need but sometimes cannot get because there is no dentist (per se) except for the one down the jungle trail about 700 miles away.
That is what I want to do with my life and I need a functional knee to do it. But no one within the VA systen will listen to a word I say. So if any of you can help me so I can walk in to that clinic with fistfull of paper with highly regarded research that shows that doing total knee replacements on young peope like me is more of an investment than it is a loss. If any of you can just help me out I would appreciate it soi incredibly much. You can email me at [email protected]....I have set up an email just for this request and I promise every single email will be read.....
Thank you in advance to any of you who can help me out. I do not know how I will ever be able to repay you but I ill promise to try. Thank you so much for allowing me to vent here and also for listening and hopefully having some sort of answers for me eventually. Again, it is not like you are helping someone who has thing going on. I have plenty going on and plenty for my future already planned out. So, I promise I would not be a waste of space!! I promise all of you as well.
Aloha
jengofet71 (if the spelling is crazy it was because I was so angry
while writing this that I probably mispelled more than just a few)
United States
0)
