Brian’s Story: ‘Wow, This is Really Working!’

I used to be very active. I was a hockey player throughout my childhood and in middle school and high school, and I did a lot of running, and a lot weight lifting. After high school, I stopped playing hockey. I became very interested in power lifting, so for probably about five years I would do a lot of squats and dead lifts weekly and I think that combined with running along with my intense sports in my childhood just kind of caused my cartilage to wear a little bit more quickly than a normal person's cartilage would. I realized that I was starting to have problems in 2013 after I just finished running the Flying Pig half marathon. After about seven miles I was feeling a lot of pain, but I wasn't going to stop because I've always played through the pain my whole life and that's probably why I'm here today.

I came to see Dr. [Rubino 00:01:14] and we did some x-rays and sort of did the assessment and then we decided to scope both knees to sort of clean them out and see if there was anything wrong with my meniscus and basically get a diagnosis. I learned at the time that I had chondromalacia grade III, which is fairly close to being bone-on-bone. There's still some cartilage left, but it's not as thick as it should be. After that, I just tried to get by managing the pain with over the counter pain medicine and kind of tried just to do my best to get by and work hard with my physical therapy. Just didn't seem to do the trick, so I came back in to see Dr. Rubino, and he recommended that I consider Synvisc as just an option, something to help. See if it helps the condition at all. I came to see Dr. James and that was in March and I got a Synvisc injection in both knees and I did see benefit from that.

Sure enough, he said it would be six to eight weeks and probably right eight weeks on the dot I felt noticeably less pain. There was still pain, but it was more bearable now. I could manage it more easily than I could beforehand. After I recovered for maybe four or five weeks, and then I felt pretty good, but as soon as I went back to work the pain came back. PRP is platelet rich plasma and basically what it is, is it's separating the platelets and the elements of your blood that cause you to heal and injecting that into a part of your body that has damage, that needs to heal but won't. Generally, knees, cartilage, doesn't have blood supply, so it doesn't get the stimulation and the nutrients that it needs to heal. Platelet rich plasma is a way of delivering the platelets directly to that damaged area so that they can do their work.

Dr. James just explained to me that it's relatively new, it's considered experimental, but it has been shown to be beneficial in patients with chondromalacia, patients with arthritis, patients with tendon issues or ligament problems. My first injection was in my right knee. After four or five weeks I had my left knee done, because I felt like in that five weeks I had gotten my money's worth out of it, so I wanted to try it in my left. Then probably four more weeks or so went by and I scheduled the second round, because I knew it was ... I felt better. I don't feel as good as I want to feel, but I do feel an improvement and so I scheduled a second round to hopefully see more improvement.

One thing I really noticed after getting my PRP injection was every morning, I have stairs in my house and my bedroom is on the second floor, so every morning I wake up and I go down the stairs. Before I had the PRP injections, I would feel the pain every morning first thing as I walk down the stairs. Your muscles are tight, so you really feel it. That's the most I would feel it all day, especially because there's nothing in your system, no pain medicine or anything like that. After the PRP injection, walking down the stairs, no pain. That was the first realization I had where I thought, "Wow, this is really working." That was a pretty good feeling.