Kathy Blackwell is not going to allow a couple of aching joints stop her from living her best life.
The 73-year-old resident of Simi Valley, Calif., a bedroom community about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, organizes regular activities for her group of seniors. The 20- to 30-member-strong band of seasoned citizens, mostly women, keep active. Over the coming weeks, they plan to catch the Beach Boys at the historic Hollywood Bowl and take a cruise to Alaska.
The busy schedule is why Ms. Blackwell intends to delay her second hip replacement surgery, opting instead for a cortisone shot in hopes of easing the pain enough to enjoy the upcoming excursions.
Not that she is shy about joint replacement. If her orthopedic surgeon offered a frequent customer punch card like the ones you get at the local coffee shop, hers would be nearly full. Ms. Blackwell’s knees and a hip have been replaced, and her other hip will be, too, once her calendar clears up.
“If you go on enough with chronic pain where there’s no relief, you get cranky,” Ms. Blackwell said.
More than 1 million new knees, hips
Joint replacements are getting more common, with about 790,000 total knee replacements and more than 450,000 hip replacements performed annually in the United States, according to the American College of Rheumatology.
Experts agree age is not a factor when considering candidates for joint replacement. Rafael Sierra, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., said he’s done hip replacements on patients as young as 12 and as old as 102. Orthopedic surgeon John Wang, MD, of the Hospital for Special Surgery, New York, has performed a total knee arthroscopy on a patient in their mid-90s. At 73, Ms. Blackwell is on the older side of the average age of 66 for a hip replacement.
“A lot of research and studies have shown that no matter what the age ranges, people end up doing great,” Dr. Wang said.
More importantly than age, older patients should be prepared for postsurgery therapy and treatment. For younger patients, the biggest drawback is outliving the estimated 25-year life span of a joint replacement. Complications are rare and occur in about 2% of procedures. These include infection, dislocation of the joint, and blood clots; other health issues you also have are not a factor.
Considering Ms. Blackwell’s hard time with her first knee replacement, it’s no small wonder that she ever set foot in a surgeon’s office again.
After putting it off for 7 years, Ms. Blackwell finally agreed to her doctor’s advice to replace her left knee in 2017 to relieve what she described as a “grinding,” chronic, bone-on-bone pain.
“It got to the point where there were no alternatives,” she said.
But her first orthopedic surgeon did a “lousy job,” leaving her with a gaping, festering wound that resulted in sepsis and required wound vacuum therapy to close the lesion. She eventually found another surgeon who removed and cleaned up her artificial knee before replacing the prosthesis. Luckily, the sepsis didn’t spread, and eight surgeries later, she was in the clear.
Ms. Blackwell’s second knee replacement in 2018 was a textbook surgery, as was a hip replacement in late 2019 .
“Your whole attitude changes,” she said.