An OCA transplant instead of early joint replacement.

I grew up playing sports. I was on the tennis team in high school, I always ran, I swam, played soccer, but more recently I've been a runner, I've run two New York City marathons and work out basically 5 to 6 days a week. I initially felt a weird pain, it was very small, I ignored it, I kept working out on it, eventually got an MRI to where it ended up that I had an osteochondral defect. I think she was quite frustrated when I met her. She had been prescribed a brace and the brace had helped, but you can't really wear a brace all the time for years on end. She was referred to me by one of my colleagues here at HSS who had seen her, who had diagnosed her with a defect of both cartilage and bone. So we had sat down, looked at her scans, and decided to go ahead with what's called an osteochondral allograft transplant, so taking cartilage and bone from a donor. And we did this for her about eight months ago now. She has regained comfort with sort of everyday activities, and we just need to slowly increase that to make sure that her body's strong enough. Dr. Gomoll very quickly was able to see the type of person I was and the type of exercise I was used to and had done, how that affected me as a person, and understood where I needed to get to post-surgery, and was able to relate kind of my rehab based on where I needed to get to. I just started to run about two months ago, but I hadn't run for a year and a half, just with everything. So I kind of had to teach my body how to run again and obviously grow my quads back to where they needed to be. So I did start to run, I'm running about a mile at a time, but I hope within the next couple months to a year post-surgery that I'll be in full capacity being able to run the miles that I used to run. My knees are all I got, so I trusted them with him, and I am just so happy with everything that he and his staff have done for me. And they've just also been realistic, there were no real false promises. He treated me as an individual person, so it was about me and my recovery and where I wanted to be. It wasn't kind of the norm and the general, it was very specific and tailored to me, which is what I needed because I had specific goals and objectives that I needed to hit after surgery, and he was great with crafting a recovery plan based on my goal.