Robotic Partial Lateral Knee Replacement Surgery Video Transcription

Michael Gesser, and I’m originally a New Yorker, I lived in Alaska and Miami and I had, when I was a young person in New York, I was playing freeze tag on Long Island when I was 11, and my knee locked up, turned up I had a cyst on my lateral meniscus, and so the surgeries at the time were obviously a bit more basic and so they took the meniscus with the cyst and so I’ve been bone on bone since I was 11 years old.

I somehow managed to do activities somewhere along the way, I climb mountains, I traveled around the world, I did skiing, I did biking, and somehow learned how to manage my pain. With Dr. Buechel, he’s just calm and he has the demeanor of a human being that gets stuff done. At the end of the day, you’re in the room with him, you go, he’s the guy to get stuff done. I don’t wanna throw anybody under the bus but there are a lot of people that only wanted to do a full knee replacement and we had actually exhausted the opportunities, said, and we couldn’t find Dr. Buechel because he was traveling so much and we had gotten so many people that had rejected the idea of the partial, that I had actually scheduled myself for a full knee replacement, which it was gonna be done in Dale, Colorado and I literally, a week before, I had just really felt I hadn’t exhausted all the opportunities there until I found Dr. Buechel.

We did it at St. Lenox Hospital and the last thing I remember is a room with a lot of people with spacesuits on and I saw my friendly robot and then I really walked out of the thing eight hours later, I woke up and had some cookies and tea. And my friend gasped, because I was listing, because I had ground this down so much because I had used it so aggressively that I was literally had an eight-degree list, I was like bone on bone for like decades and so I literally became square so I gained an inch and a half of height, fundamentally, and I walk square as opposed to compensating and listing. A couple of percocets, sleeping a couple of nights at the end of the day, that’s it fundamentally. A little bit of swelling, I did icing and stuff and I did physical therapy, but I actually had more pain before the surgery.

Yes, he’s an extraordinary man and an extraordinary surgeon, and the technology is phenomenal, it’s literally, absolutely an exciting time to be alive. Dr. Buechel is amazing, robots are amazing, and Moore’s Law is alive and well. Computers get smarter all the time, and yeah, it’s awesome.