COVID-19 delayed Florida woman’s surgery. Now she can walk without pain
Sandra Ford was all set to have her left knee replaced in late March.
But the coronavirus pandemic put a halt to elective surgeries in Florida.
So Ford, who retired from the Manatee County School District as an administrator last June, had to wait.
It was the second knee replacement surgery Ford needed.
Arthritis caused pain to come and go in her knees, and she had the right knee replaced in January.
““Knee replacement has a lot of emotional set up to it,” Ford said. “It’s not just physical. And so you get all ready, you get yourself all psyched up and then it gets delayed. The challenging part was, for me, it was delayed to an unknown date.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis allowed hospitals to resume elective surgeries, and Lakewood Ranch Medical Center began them last week.
On Monday, Ford had her left knee replaced there.
Ford said if she wanted a hard date for the surgery, she’d have to wait until September and that wasn’t feasible because she could barely walk.
Instead, she was in a rotation and received a call that she could come in on Monday, with physical therapy to follow the surgery.
“My goal is to be completely done with everything and into a good place by my birthday in July,” said the 67-year-old Ford, who is a Sun City Center resident.
There are hundreds who get elective surgeries each month at Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, LRMC chief executive officer Andy Guz said.
COVID-19 stopped elective surgeries from happening at the hospital until last week.
But there’s a wrinkle for patients and staff compared to before the pandemic struck.
“We’re asking that all patients that are scheduled for an elective procedure get a coronavirus test,” Guz said.. “And we actually do those for them at the hospital.”
Guz said they do the coronavirus test during the patient’s pre-admission a couple days prior to their procedure, as well as draw blood and ask questions to make sure they’re healthy enough for the surgery.
“Just to confirm they are negative before they have the test,” Guz said.
Masks are also given to patients, while staff wear them in public areas of the hospital, Guz said.
“Our schedule is quite heavy, because as you can imagine there’s quite a backlog of cases between hip and knee replacement, ankle replacements, spine surgeries, shoulder replacements and a multitude of other surgeries,” said Caroline McGrath, chair coordinator for the hospital’s orthopedic, joint and spine center.
McGrath said the preoperative class is offered virtually, the group physical therapy class for post-operation is now structured in adherence with social distancing guidelines and there are stringent sanitization processes afterwards.
“We’ve thought long and hard about this,” McGrath said. “Unfortunately, we’ve had weeks to prepare for this coming back up again .So we’ve put that time to good use in preparing for the processes to be stringent.”
