Knee Replacement Failure, Revision Surgery, Recovery

By Robert Douglas

Seven or eight years ago I decided to start working out, so I started running. Through the time I was running I had multiple meniscus tears. I would go in and have them scoped to have them cleaned out. Little did I know what was ahead. I was in for a two year knee recovery.

The real trouble started in September of 2016. I was playing flag football, and I ended up tearing my meniscus again, but I also tore the articular cartilage that lined the surface of my femur bone. I had a scope in January of 2017 to clean that out. It really wasn't doing well: I had a lot of pain still. I talked to my surgeon about it and he basically said "You're just gonna have to live with it." I went to another orthopedic surgeon to get a second opinion and he said, "Well, I agree with him, but we could give you a steroid injection if you want." That was in February. I said, "Sure, why not? It couldn't hurt."

A Steroid Injection

Well, exactly 24 hours after I got the steroid injection, my knee just got swollen and stiff, and I really didn't know what was going on. I thought it might have been a reaction to the steroid shot at first, so I thought, "Well, I'll give it a couple of days and see what happens." It was a Friday when it swelled up, and so I just waited throughout the weekend: it never got better. I went into the emergency room on Monday, this was the 20th of February, 2017, and told them, "Look, something's going on with my knee." I told him I had steroid injection, 24 hours later it got stiff. What's interesting is when I went in I really didn't even present with any outward symptoms that you could tell. However, I had developed a septic knee.

Getting Tested | Finding The Problem

They were actually going to turn me away. My temperature was normal. My knee was not obviously swollen, maybe a little bit. It wasn't red. It wasn't hot to the touch. I said, "Something is wrong, just please get some testing going." They did a CBC and an x-ray and they did a CRP, and it was just a little bit elevated. They came back to me and said, "You know, it's a little bit elevated, your white blood count. Not really a lot, but the only way we're going to be able to tell is tap your knee." So they did that procedure, and you could tell right away. They had a hard time pulling it out, actually.

Time in the Hospital

I spent a week in the hospital. I had two surgeries back-to-back to clean out my knee. Then, out of the hospital, I was at home on IV medications. The physical therapist that came out and told me there wasn't anything that they could do for me, so I was without therapy for six weeks. I finally went to outpatient rehab after I got off the IV antibiotics. The other thing about my knee is that the infection actually got into my femur, so I got osteomyelitis as well. My knee was shredded. All the soft tissue was gone. I was bone-to-bone, and I was in a lot of pain. I could not walk. I had to buy a mobile wheelchair to get around. After a septic knee you have to wait so long to make sure it's totally eradicated before you can have a knee replacement.

The surgeon told me 12 months, but he said, "If you're good in eight months we'll try to do it then."

My First TKA

In November of 2017, I had my initial TKR, a total knee replacement,