Knee Surgery Anesthesia

An interview with Dr. John Everett conducted by PJ Ewing

This interview was complete three weeks after Dr. Everett’s knee replacement surgery. In the discussion Dr. Everett covers his two knee replacement surgeries, his work as an anesthesiologist, and various approaches to knee surgery anesthesia. Click on the Play button above to hear the interview.

About Dr. Everett

I'm an anesthesiologist in Lansing, Michigan. I've been here for 35 years. My story revolves around the fact that I tore the meniscus in my left knee in 1995. I was told in 10 years I’d need a knee replacement. I put it off. I had what's called a microfracture in 2010. A repair bought me nine more years. Finally, I decided it needed to be replaced.

I had some experience before my most recent surgery because I had an acute injury on my right knee and had a partial knee replacement in 2017 which went well. Unfortunately, I'm in an old group of people and my business partners needed their hips replaced, so I had to put my left knee off until August 23rd, 2019.

In a nutshell:  I'm bow legged runner and I ran and skied too many miles and my knees finally failed.

My Partial Knee Replacement

So it was time to have a partial knee replacement. I had the medial side, the inside of my knee, replaced as an outpatient at a surgery center. I checked in at 12:30  p.m. I was home at 4:30 p.m.. At home I had the X10 Knee Machine, which I nicknamed The Punisher because it hurts (just a little bit).

The big thing in knee replacement is range of motion. So I got my range of motion from 0º to 130º back in about seven days. The biggest thing is not the pain, it's the swelling. That's what you have to work on. At three weeks, at the time of this writing, the swelling is gone.

That's my story. I just push it a bit, not too much, on the X10. Yesterday, which was almost three weeks out, I finally realized I was walking up and down the stairs normally.

My Anesthesia

I had a double block called a "quad sparing femoral nerve block." And then a block behind the knee. So when I came home from surgery I had zero pain, which is fake and led me to do too much the next day. I had surgery on a Friday. I was doing yard work on Saturday because I had no pain and the swelling didn't hit yet. But I'm a bit crazy. The pain regimen we use is a multimodal therapy. We use Celebrex, Neurontin, and Tylenol upfront. I had a Norco and Tramadol, which are both narcotics and had a couple of pills of Dilaudid. It got really bad at night for the first three nights. In the daytime it was easier: you're distracted by moving a lot more during the day.

They gave me a bunch of pills. I've taken about a third of them. I'm down to just the Celebrex in the morning with aspirin to prevent deep vein thrombosis. I had physical therapy come to my home for four visits, but I was already walking, moving, driving and shopping,

I don't know what the physical therapist is doing for me. Other people might need more. The X10 was three times a day for the first 14 days. And then I cut back to just the morning to get my range of motion fired up. I didn't need it after that. I kept it for a week more than I should have. Maybe three weeks just because I didn't know what else to do. At two weeks I didn't know I'd make three weeks, but today I went bicycling on the spin bike, and went to the Mac (gym facility) and worked out. And that's that.

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