>> Moving a child back and forth from school.
There's a lot of stuff.
And okay my car holds a lot but I have that whole cargo box on top.
It's another one of those things that you take for granted until you go, I can't step there,
I can't get up there, I can't put weight on my leg.
So, I was bouncing up and down on the car because all the stuff was up there.
Packed up my child yesterday and drove all the way home from Maine.
So, there was tons of stuff and I spent half of yesterday going up and down, packing the box,
moving things around, and I think it was probably my fifth trip when it dawned on me,
last year, the year before, three years ago, it's like,
I would have had to bring somebody else with me.
I wouldn't have been able to do it.
And it's such a -- it's one of those things in your life, it's just a normal routine.
You still take it for granted, as soon as you can go back to doing it,
until you recognize there was a period of time you couldn't.
[ Music ]
>> Malalignment of the knee puts a lot of abnormal forces on the knee.
When somebody has a straight leg, the forces experienced by the knee are normal.
The hip, knee, ankle line is a straight line.
Forces go through the center of the knee.
With a knock knee, what's happening is because of the way the knees are shaped,
forces are not going right through the center of the knee.
Rather what's happening is the outside of the knees,
the lateral side of the knees are being excessively loaded
and the inside part of the knees underloaded.
And over time what ends up happening is cartilage wear is accelerated
on the lateral side of the knee and ligaments start to stretch
out on the medial or inside part of the knee.
Then over time as the arthritis progresses the deformity actually gets worse
because of the cartilage wearing out and because of the stretching out of the ligaments.
>> I remember, even as a kid, you know, lining up in gym,
going to the nurse's office and say, put your feet together.
And I'd, you know, do my best.
And I'd get yelled at by these grown ups you look up to and you can't put your feet together.
And I couldn't.
And I didn't get it.
I didn't get it for a long time until, I don't know, 30, 40 maybe,
and realized that it was the bones in my legs.
That it was the actual shape of the structure that was holding me up.
That that was why I couldn't wear short skirts, why leggings looked funny,
why I couldn't put my feet together.
I couldn't.
I literally couldn't.
>> We're underloading all this part that was --
that is, you know, has some degree of arthritis is now getting to heal
because the mechanics are improved.
These are pictures from the operating room.
See how we're able to recreate the line from the hip to the ankle and then we size
with appropriate wedges until we get a weightbearing line as we want it.
By doing osteotomy we can straighten the leg.
We can correct the knock-kneed deformity and then create a line between the hip,
knee, and ankle that is straight.
That normalizes the forces in the knee.
Number one, knee pain gets better.
Number two, people feel better about the way they look
and their alignment and the way they walk.
And number three, we are changing the future.
We're making the knee last longer.
So, in the pre-arthritic knee we are eliminating a major risk factor for developing arthritis.
>> Two years ago, you know, knees are getting a little achier.
Going to blame it on arthritis.
I'm going to blame it on age.
And I was walking down the stairs, took a couple of steps, went to land on my left leg
and it had gotten so out of it, the kneecap moved and it actually buckled.
And if I hadn't had railings, I would have gone all the way down the stairs.
I said, okay, this needs to be fixed now.
And I started doing research.
Oh, well, you know, you can't really have knee replacements.
You're kind of young.
You'd have to do it again.
And it took me a long time and a lot of research and I found out that there is some place
that will actually look at your bones and you can have them reconstructed.
I was flabbergasted.
It's like, you mean this can be fixed?
And I didn't know that.
I made a call and I came in.
And I had my first consultation with Dr. Rozbruch.
And it was interesting because if you've been through this all your life,
you don't realize how much it's actually -- you kind of like feel ashamed of it.
And I came in and we started talking about and I was almost afraid to mention that it bothered me
because I knew that structurally it needed help.
And he actually asked me, he said, well, you know, psychologically,
emotionally does this bother you?
And the question took me by surprise and I almost started to cry.
And I -- even if I think about it now, it had such a strong effect on how I felt about myself.
And it's not about this, you know, love yourself in any shape.
It was about something was wrong with me.
And, you know, that's a feeling, no matter how successful you become, no matter what you do,
you've got a bad feeling that there's something wrong.
And I was so afraid that wasn't going to be valid and he just took it right over.
He's like, no, that's a very important part of being able --
you know, healing everything that needs to be healed.
>> That's great.
>> There I go.
>> You're walking --
>> They just go straight.
[Laughter].
It's amazing.
They just go straight.
I was telling Danny, it's like I was in the office about a month ago and I had
on a short skirt and I looked down and I went, my legs are straight.
And I just like, I was like beaming.
So, last thing I ever would have said to take a picture of until now.
>> We draw a line from the center of the hip to the center of the ankle.
And that is the weightbearing line.
It's called the mechanical axis line.
You can see that that line on both sides falls through the lateral compartment of the knee.
Not through the center of the knee, but actually, it's deviated.
You can see we measure that here.
It's 23 millimeters of deviation, here it's 19 millimeters of deviation.
Our goal, after further analysis, we know that in Bonnie's case the source
of the deformity is the distal femur.
And so, the treatment was a distal femoral osteotomy,
opening wedge, using plates and screws.
And you can see after we have done that,
now the hip to ankle line goes through the center of the knee.
So, this changes the mechanics of the knee tremendously.
It's an opening wedge osteotomy.
You can see there's a triangle there.
It's shimmed.
It's a shim.
It's basically opened up the exact number of degrees that it's necessary
to achieve this correct alignment.
We use a bone graft and a titanium plate and screws to hold things in place.
>> Little by little you change your life.
And you don't know it until you suddenly look around and somebody says, hey, looks do another
and you go, oh, wait I can't do that.
You know, I won't make it until the end.
I won't make the whole trip.
[ Music ]
When I stand up in the morning and I look down and my legs are straight.
They're a little achy because they're recovering.
But they don't -- I don't need braces.
I can walk down the hall.
I can do all those things and I've got a lot more I'm going to do.