Patient of the Month

For Betty, 10 years of playing volleyball coupled with arthritis and everyday use wore out her knees. “I used a cane for a year and a half until it just hurt too much,” she says.

So she decided to get two doctors’ opinions on what could be done. One doctor told her she needed a complete knee replacement and that her recovery would take six months. “That sounded like torture,” she says with a wry chuckle. “I had read about Dr. Davis in some health magazines, but I never knew anybody who had gone to him. The articles just impressed me, and I was pretty sure I wanted to go to Dr. Davis.”

She and her husband Donald set up an appointment, and when Dr. Davis received the results of her new x-rays, he set a date to perform a Uni-knee, or partial knee, replacement on her right knee. Betty’s surgery was at 7 a.m., and it took two hours.

“Of course I didn’t see him in surgery because I was in lala land, but at 2 p.m., they brought me a walker and had me walk from my bed by the window to the hallway,” she explains. “It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it was going to because this was just surgical pain, not the terrible pain I had had before.”

She spent one night in the hospital. Dr. Davis checked on her in the morning, and Betty was able to go home after lunch. Physical therapists came to her house three times a week to help her strengthen her knee. “They give me new exercises, and I think they try to think of things that will hurt worse and worse,” she says laughing. “But today I walked out into the backyard without a cane. We have 80 feet out to the canal, and we have 11 steps. I walked down to the water and walked back up the steps like a normal person instead of one step at a time. It’s working very well.”

For Betty, just being able to do normal household chores, like cooking and dusting, without pain is worth undergoing the surgery. “If for some reason my knee quit working tomorrow, I would still be grateful to Dr. Davis. The pain is gone, and it’s only been three weeks,” she says. Betty plans to have her left knee done as soon as Dr. Davis gives the OK.

“Dr. Davis has such a great bedside manner, and is just so pleasant,” she says. “I almost get giddy talking about all he’s done for me because the pain is gone.”