At age 44, Curtis Taylor didn't know what to do about his knee. He'd injured it years before playing football, and now it had an unfortunate tendency to pop painfully out of place, often while he was driving. Taylor would have to stop the car, get out and stand there until the knee slid back into place. Surgery hadn't fixed the problem, and an artificial knee wasn't an option for younger patients like him. Those devices have to be replaced every 10 or 15 years, each time with more complex surgery because of the repeated cutting of bone. "It was either live with it or have something else done," Taylor says. Then, while driving one day in June 2002, Taylor turned on the radio and heard orthopedic surgeon Marc Hungerford talking about a device, called the UniSpace. Hungerford portrayed it as an alternative to knee replacement. The chrome, dishlike device floats in the space between the two main bones in the knee, stretching damaged ligaments back to their normal position, and providing a smooth surface on which the bones in the knee can glide painlessly. Inserting the device required only a 3-inch incision. Existing bone wouldn't have to be cut, so future knee-replacement surgery wouldn't be compromised. A month later, Taylor had the device implanted. Today, his knee has stopped popping, and he's also back playing sports, for the first time in years. - Gary Logan
Hopkins Medical News, Spring 2003 |
