Quality of Life Restored
Robert Reguera did not want to move any further into his seventies with a beautiful, younger wife, and be anything other than the vibrant, active partner she deserves. “I’d waited 30 years for her,” he says, with a radiant smile, “I didn’t want her to have to do for me. I wanted to do for myself.”
He came to a point this summer, in Hawaii, when he couldn’t “do.” He was in the surf, and his knee gave way – it had been painful for some time – and he was embarrassed to find he couldn’t get to shore without help. He and his wife decided then and there it was time to do something. But he’d had one knee done before, and it had never been quite right, so they both had concerns.
They went together to the Sonoma Valley Hospital’s “Total Joint Replacement Camp” and listened intently as Janet Alexander, the “Nurse Navigator” who accompanies TJR patients every step of the way, laid out in great detail the preparation, the procedure and the post-operative process patients go through. Education is a vital part of the Sonoma Valley Total Joint Replacement Program. “If patients have knowledge, they have less anxiety,” she says, “and with less anxiety, they heal better. Our goal is to have patients have no anxiety at all.” Reguera says that when he went in for his surgery, he had no questions. He felt completely prepared.
Three months later, he can’t stop smiling when he talks about the transformation in his quality of life. “I have no pain at all!” He’s able to be active again. Sure, there is some soreness in the muscles, he explains, because Dr. Brown has an ingenious way of going around the muscles without cutting into them, as had been done with his other knee – so he’s had some soreness, but no pain, as there had been with the other one. And he’s healed so much faster. “That other one always bothers me,” he says. “But with this one, I have no pain. My physical therapists had me exercising the first day,” he says. “They were so great. Every one of them. And Dr. Brown’s office assistant, Jessica, was just so wonderful to me. I can’t say enough good things.”
The Sonoma Valley Total Joint Replacement program was started at the end of June 2010, as the result of a suggestion by Sonoma Valley Hospital’s chief anesthesiologist Dr. Steve Licata, of Marin Anesthesiologists, a group brought in by former CEO Carl Gerlach to raise the Sonoma Valley Hospital surgery services to state of the art. The Total Joint Replacement concept is that joint replacement, to be really successful, begins with education, continues though the guidance of the nurse navigator and, with the combination of a world class anesthesiology team to minimize the effects of surgery and a world class orthopedic surgeons – Dr. Mike Brown, Dr. Robert Harf and Dr. Noah Weiss – restores mobility and freedom from pain to patients who may have thought it impossible.