Day 15 — Recovery Day 14 | Friday, August 14, 2026
“Good evening party people, iKnee people, all you people, you people…..what do you mean, all you people? Well, I mean all you PFD iKnee people. Come on. Anyway, I just thought I’d check in.
It is Friday the 14th and I want to give you an update on what has transpired over the last day / day and a half. So, we had a good day on Thursday. We had Clint come to the house back-to-back and he came today back-to-back. However, yesterday, let me tell you what happened. He came to the house and did some work on my leg.
It’s very… you know, it’s very stiff and the stiffness doesn’t come from the knee joint. The stiffness is coming from the surrounding traumatized tissue from the surgery and it’s very inflamed. It’s very swollen — edema.
On top of that, a huge deal is how I came into the surgery. Both my knees are so messed up. I needed a double knee replacement. I’ve been waiting 12 years for a knee replacement, and I’ve been in chronic knee pain for 20 years total. I was in pain for 8 years before that, to get to that timeframe where you have to have a knee replacement.
It’s crazy. In that journey of pain, waiting for the iKnee, my muscles have atrophied, my tendons, you know, my muscles have gotten smaller. Everything got smaller (my legs, my glutes) because I don’t have that range of motion, or my body is listing one way or the other, kind of cantering off to one side as your body will do naturally to prevent pain.
In that journey, and in the way my body has reacted to the pain, my legs have stiffened up, tightened up, less flexible. The range of motion has decreased significantly. When you don’t have a full range of motion in your body, specifically in your knees and my legs joints, things get really, really stiff and non-flexible. On top of that, my whole life, I have been the least flexible person on any sports team I’ve ever been on. I’ve never ever been flexible. Stretching was not fun. The hurdle stretches or any of those stretches just are not fun for me.
Going into the surgery, it was a big deal because I came in at such a negative. Then you add the years of atrophy, and you add what happens during surgery when they really do a number on you to get to your knee. They want to clean it up and make sure the range of motion is there. They take your leg and they crank it to full extension, you know, then down to flexion and basically put those muscles in a place they haven’t been in for 15 years. When that happens, everything hurts.
Okay, so now that I’m coming out of surgery and I’m in this recovery period, the inflammation and the edema is what I have to battle. I have to battle it to keep it down and manage it so I can start actually getting a true physical therapy or rehab and getting my knee back to full range of motion in a normal therapeutic session to break up the scar tissue.
Okay, so what happened yesterday, (Thursday), Clint came back-to-back and we worked it, worked it, and worked it. We got it down to a nice extension level, got the flexion there, and did all the exercise routines. However, after he’s done, I am hurting. I mean, it is raw and I’m sitting on a therapy table working and stretching, and the rest of the day I kind of just let it calm down and relax. Then Thursday evening, Shannan was like, “Hey, let’s get this thing going! Let’s do it again!”
She put me through the paces on Thursday evening, so that’s twice in one day back-to-back. It just didn’t feel too good. Today, being Friday, I woke up and came down the stairs — holy cow! It was very, very painful and it was swollen on top of that. I think it didn’t do me any favors by putting on a compression sock. It was not the full leg sock, just the one that comes up above your calf. Which, I did that not really realizing what I was doing to myself.”
– Eric Hansen (iKnee Patient One)
For more information about the iKnee, check out iorthopedicsinc.com.
