Quote from: kneehowguys on April 18, 2014, 03:56:40 AM
MediumDrink,
1. What will give you the best chance of no knee pain?
2. What does running feel like?
3. Could you post more pictures of your scars up close in good lighting?
4. Why a burn specialist for LL scars? You don't have burns. How did you decide on what type of scar revision surgery to do? Why not geometric broken line revision?
5. If you had to get externals/LON tibias now, where would you go? Including cost in the equation. Part of me wonders if Beijing + scar revision surgery costs almost as much as Jamal.
1. Probably internal femurs with the nail inserted through the hip. Nobody's really sure what it is about tibiae IM nails that causes knee pain. ChrisIsaak here says he has no pain with the nails going into the femur through the knee though.
2. Running felt weird the first time I did it, like I was on stilts. Now it just feels normal, although my legs are more prone to getting tired if I have to do distance running.
3. It's hard to get the pictures to come out well. This one is the best I can do after taking a bunch just now. It shows two scars from the pins near the left knee that have been excised.
4. I went to a regular plastic surgeon for all but the osteotomy scars, which the plastic surgeon said he wouldn't touch due to the thinness and superficiality of the skin directly covering the tibiae. It took me a while to find a doctor who'd have enough confidence in his abilities to take on my two osteotomy scars, and he happened to be a burn specialist who's an expert at scar revision anywhere on the body, since people can't be choosy about where they get burned. All of my scar treatments were simple excisions, and I'm sure the doctors knew what broken line revision is but just decided not to use it.
5. Beijing and scar revision probably does cost as much as Jamal, especially with the disproportionate price increases since 2007. There was no way at the time for me to afford Dr. Dragan (Jamal's mentor who did the surgery at the time). It was $10k more that I didn't have and couldn't get in a reasonable amount of time. It was over a year before I started to get the scar revisions done.
My first choice was to get external-only tibiae LL with Dr. Mitkovic because I didn't like the invasiveness of internal nails, lengthening or fixed. So if I had it to do over again, I'd go back to Serbia and not mention the mental health medications. His devices are small enough that it's not too bad to wear them for 9 months, not like Ilizarov frames which would have you hating life for sure if you wore them for that long.