surgery

Advanced Surgery Center of Orlando

I’m facing another knee replacement surgery. I’ve experienced two so far, a partial on my left knee in late 2012, and a full on my right knee in early 2016.

I’ve been dealing with issues on my left knee since before I retired, but I kept putting it off hoping that when I retired and stopped the long daily commutes that the stress would lesson, and thus the problems with my left knee would somehow dissipate. It actually did at first, but then they slowly crept back. Unfortunately the bad symptoms started to reappear during the height of the pandemic; I wasn’t about to go get surgery during all of that. Now the pandemic, and specifically the pandemic lockdowns, have long since come to an end. The pain in the left knee has now increased to the point where no amount of wishful thinking combined with physical therapy will allow me to ignore it.

The practice that will be doing the work will be the same practice that performed the 2016 surgery. I much prefer that group because they perform the replacement as an out-patient procedure. That meant in 2016 I was back home the same day and recovered at my home. I much prefer home recovery if possible.

I’ll get a call this afternoon telling me when the procedure will be performed and who’ll do it. I asked for the original 2016 surgeon, but he’s booked out to November of this year, so I’ll use one of the other two orthopedic surgeons in the practice. Hopefully that means my procedure will be scheduled sooner than November.

poor sidewalk safety next to a doctor’s complex

I came across this sidewalk painting when my wife and I visited one of her doctors in a building complex next to the Dr. P. Phillips hospital. The building is jamb-packed with doctors and laboratories, all in the service of medicine. So you’d think that the building maintenance would make sure that entrances to the buildings would be as safe as possible. You’d be wrong. Consider the following I discovered just outside one of the buildings.

There are problems with this sidewalk which required they be dug up and re-poured. Instead they painted yellow caution stripes around the problematic areas and called it a day. If these are temporary, they’ve been down a while now as evidenced by the environmental staining from rain and being outdoors in general.

These are sidewalks that are used by both healthy walkers as well as people with handicaps. My wife is in the later category. I always go with her now to help her navigate problems such as these. What I find disturbing is that this is next to a multi-story doctor’s complex, which is next door to a major hospital. How they’re able to get away with something this lazy, and why they can’t find the funds to perform a proper repair, is beyond my understanding.