By the time she was 45, the mother of three from New Bedford had endured ten surgeries, starting when she was barely in her teens. Kristen didn’t find relief until 2023 when she had a total right knee replacement that changed her life.
“I’ve had screws put in, screws taken out, I have had everything done: floating kneecap, patella (tendon) instability. I had my first surgery when I was 13,” says Kristen, who works as a certified medical assistant at Southcoast Health Orthopedic Surgery in Fall River. “When I was a child, I couldn’t do any sports. I was constantly falling. My nickname was klutz.”
Her knees hurt almost all the time, and sometimes she had to pop her kneecap back in place to be able to walk or even straighten her legs. It got worse and worse through the years, but she had to keep going because she was a single mother with three children, including a set of twins, who had busy school and after-school schedules that often required her to drive them around.
Surgeons had very few options left for someone who had endured seven surgeries in her left knee and three on the right.
Work was difficult because her job was often physical. She had to lift patients, put them in splints, remove staples, give ultrasound cortisone injections, hop off and onto stools and do all the other things that an orthopedic surgery center demands.
“One day at work my right knee gave out,” she says.
Dr. Michael Langworthy, a renowned Southcoast Health orthopedic surgeon who worked with Kristen at that time at the Southcoast Health Orthopedic Surgery Center office in Dartmouth, examined her.
“He told me, ‘Your knees are end stage arthritis, you need to have a total replacement. I can give you 20 or 30 years with the new knee,’” she says.
She says Langworthy told her they could “just do a partial and replace the kneecap but I would have to come back a few years later for a total.”
That decided it for Kristen.
Dr. Langworthy did the total knee replacement on her right leg in June 2023. Because of her work, she had a pretty good idea of what to expect with the surgery and recovery. She spent the night after the surgery at St. Luke’s Hospital because she was a smoker with high blood pressure, but she was up walking just hours after she came out of surgery.
She was able to manage her post-surgical pain with Tylenol only, thanks to the nerve blocks administered during surgery, and she required no stronger medication until she began eight weeks of physical rehabilitation at the Southcoast Health Rehabilitation Services in Dartmouth.
“In the beginning, physical therapy was tough: stretching and bending. My biggest challenge was just getting my leg to straighten, the hamstring was so tight,” she says, but after a week of stretching exercises and using a Dynasplit stretching device, things got easier.
“I was surprised there was no pain from the day of the surgery until now. A few aches, other than during physical therapy,” she says.
She was able to return to work 11 weeks after surgery, and she is able to do her job without knee pain for the first time in many years.
“As long as I’m careful and don’t overstrain it, I should be OK,” she says. “I still have to be careful, lifting patients using my legs, watching how I sit on a stool. Other than that I have no restrictions and I have no pain. I’m 45 years old and I was living with pain since I was 13. Now I don’t have to.”
She says she may or may not need to have a second right knee replacement 20 or 30 years from now, but that she knows that in the near future she will need to have the left knee — always the more painful of the two — replaced, too.
And she hopes it will be Langworthy and the rest of the team at Southcoast Health Orthopedic Surgery doing that surgery.
“I love Dr. Langworthy. He’s great to work with. I had a great experience. Of all the surgeons I have had, I always recommend Dr. Langworthy. I tell patients (at Southcoast Health Orthopedic Surgery) that I went through it and it helps them.”
To learn more about Southcoast Health Orthopedic services visit Orthopedic Treatments MA & RI | Southcoast Health.
Southcoast Health is a not-for-profit, charitable, community-based health system with multiple access points, offering an integrated continuum of health services throughout southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
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