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I Invite You To Do Something Different by Dr. John F. Miller DDS
Merry Christmas Everyone. I hope this special season finds you all well and in the service of your neighbors and friends. Isn’t that really what it’s all about? I love it. I recently found myself in a familiar situation in a familiar location. The location being on my back at the Flathead Valley Orthopedic Center. The situation involved taking X-Rays of my left knee. “I can only imagine how much that thing costs,” I mention to the X-Ray technician positioning the sensor underneath my left knee. His sensor was about one square foot while the sensors I use in my patient’s mouths are about one square inch. You see, I’ve been here before. Some time ago I had the displeasure of destroying my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) in the final moments of an intense Rec-League basketball game. No worries however, my kind Doctor in San Francisco gave me
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another guy’s ACL and drilled it through my Tibia and into the head of my Femur. After rehab everything felt fantastic. Until I destroyed that one, and the one after that... which happened to be an Achilles Tendon functioning as my new ACL. Now was I frustrated? Absolutely. Was I surprised? No. Was I upset with the doctors that repaired my knee the first 2 times? No way. Was I upset with myself ? Definitely. My second knee injury came at the bottom of a cliff-drop on Big Mountain, and my third knee injury came during a wakeboarding backflip attempt on Echo Lake. I was participating in high risk activities all the while being in denial that I was indeed aging. As I relayed this wakeboarding story to my Knee Doctor he showed no signs of sympathy. “You’re not 20 years old anymore” he exclaimed. He then informed me that I’m at risk of “hollowing” out my femur from all of my prior knee surgeries. Each one requiring a hole to be drilled through the femoral head.
I sheepishly accept responsibility and we exchange the look that lets the other know that we each already know the end of this story. This story ends with me having a full knee replacement at some point in the future. A great comedian started a bit once by saying, “my cholesterol is high...because it was high a year ago when I had it checked and...well...I haven’t done anything different.” Famed German Physicist Albert Einstein has been quoted as defining insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This is quite dramatic, my doctor probably doesn’t consider me insane but rather a little nuts, bonkers, bananas, crazy even. If I keep pursuing high risk activities I cannot expect anything different than frequent musculoskeletal injury. I walk a mile in my Doctor’s shoes daily. I stand on the receiving end of watered down dietary habits. I scrape the plaque off of gumlines. I inform patients that their current habits along with multiple sites of tooth decay