Extreme Pain After Total Knee Replacement in 2019

an interview with Tom Jurewicz from Michigan

Below are highlights from Tom and Mary's conversation. To listen to the interview click the Play button above.

About Me

Hi, I'm Tom. I'm 59 years old, and I've been an athlete my entire life. I played pretty much every sport that you could play as a kid, and I ended up being a scholarship football player out of high school and played a couple of years in college and continued to be active my whole life. I took up skiing later in life and loved that. I used to run, work out six days a week in the gym, lift. I've been very active my whole life. I coached basketball. I have two daughters, and I was their basketball coach for most of their young adult life. During one ski session, I tweaked my right knee probably about 20 years ago, not too bad.

In 2003, during a basketball practice, I was being a 'defensive mannequin', and I turned the wrong way and I tore the cartilage in my right knee, and that caused an arthroscopic surgery where they took out 30% of the cartilage. For the past 16 years, my knee has slowly deteriorated until I was bone on bone. Basically, I went in and the doctor said, "Your only choice is to have knee replacement surgery."

I had no idea that I would be managing extreme pain after knee replacement surgery.

I had gone through that experience with the scope, and I honestly thought that my recovery was going to be very similar to the recovery that I had being scoped. That was about five weeks of therapy, which started seven days after the procedure. I was up almost 100% at the end of that period of time and it was very easy. My mom also had knee replacement surgery about a year and a half ago, and she went through it in a breeze, and she had no complications, and she didn't suffer any discomfort, and her therapy went like clockwork as well. Because of those two personal experiences, I was expected, because I was active, to sail through therapy, and I didn't think it was going to be a big deal at all.

The Knee Replacement Surgery

I was told, the doctor said everything went great. I had a surgery on the 28th, Friday, and after surgery, I was fine that day. I felt good. They put a blocker in my knee. I didn't even think I needed the pain medication that night because my knee felt fine and the swelling wasn't that bad. I was all set to be released from the hospital the following day on Saturday. They were preparing the discharge papers. Saturday morning at about 10:30, a physical therapist came in and said, "We have to do some certain standard tests to see that we can discharge you. You have to be able to go to the bathroom and you have to be able to get in and out of a car." They said, "Just come on down."

I was in a room with another patient who had knee replacement surgery, who was in his 80s, and the physical therapist just literally had him stay in bed in the room and had him sit in a chair and did a very minimal amount of therapy in the room. My therapist said, "Okay, let's get out of bed." He had me walk from my room down to the physical therapy room in the hospital, which was about 150 feet. When I was there, he had me basically get on a table. He bent my knee to 90 degrees. He had me do leg lifts. He had me do leg extensions. He had me getting up and out of a car. They had a fake car there. He had me walking up and down stairs. It lasted a good 20 to 25 minutes. Then, he asked me to walk back to my room.