Joint Replacement and Ultrarunning

Computer is on the fritz (by the way, where does that expression come from?) so this post will be short.

I was thinking about joint replacement surgery yesterday--knees and hips--and realized that I do not know a single runner or Ultrarunner who has had such a surgery.

Not one.

All the artificial joint recipients I know tend to be sedentary or inactive.  I need to investigate this further, realizing that correlation does not necessarily mean causation.  But it certainly is food for thought.

Surgery

Today I am having a couple surgeries to fix a couple bio-mechanical problems that are not getting better on their own, and won't: tennis elbow repair + nerve release, and hernia repair.

I floated an idea to the orthopedic doctor (arm) and the general surgeon (hernia) about doing the surgeries during the same operating session. Benefit to me would be one general anesthesia and one recovery period. I was expecting one or both to say "Well, that might be a good idea but there are too many variables, and besides, I'm too busy and my schedule is too crazy to be able to do that sort of special accommodation."

I was wrong, in addition to being astounded. Both doctors were strongly in favor of the idea, saying "Great idea! We can make that work for you!"

As for Mister Tristan (the blog, not the 3 year old human being), because my right arm (of course, I am right-handed) will be immobilized from the tendon work and neurosurgery, I will be unable to keyboard for probably a couple weeks.

Thankfully the Blogspot software has a scheduling feature whereby a blogger can queue up posts in advance to be published on a specific day and time. So what I've done is to write several new posts in advance but largely I will recycle some posts from a year ago (May 2010). Hopefully these will be fresh for many of my 2011 readers who were not around in 2010.