Christopher Strattner

Three years ago I was running with my wife. She's a bit faster than me and my ego has a tough time with that. I tried to shave a little off a turn to catch her and I twisted my knee in a rut. I heard a sound, and before I knew it I was on my back and in pain - everywhere. My knee hurt, my back hurt, my teeth hurt, and even my hair hurt.

I went to my local doctor. He described my knee as "destroyed," shrugged and suggested a total knee replacement. He told me my running days were over at the age of 51, even though once upon a time I had worked for Reebok as a "human guinea pig" and ran 10 Ironman Triathlons including the world championship race in Hawaii.

A set of second opinions from HSS gave me other options. To start with, Dr. Iyer figured out that my "everything" hurt when I fell because I had landed on a rock, broken a couple bones in my spine and messed up a disc. Meanwhile, Dr. Nawabi looked at my knee and suggested a Matrix-Induced Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation (MACI). His plan was to harvest the good parts of my knee, send them to a lab to regrow the same parts from my own DNA and then install them.

The two doctors worked as a team to figure out the best order of operations (literally) and together they decided it would be easier to rehab a spine with a damaged knee than it would be to rehab a knee with a damaged spine, so Dr. Iyer got the first shot.

So here we are, three years and four surgeries later and I'm back in business. As the commanding officer of the police academy, I ran with a class of new recruits last week and some of the 20-year-olds had trouble keeping up with me! I spent part of my weekend telemark skiing (that's like doing deep knee lunges on skis all the way down the mountain), and the rest of it doing yard work and cleaning the garage (okay, so maybe everything that HSS gave me back isn't *super* fun!)

The real kicker is this isn't the first time HSS lightning had struck for me: 10 years ago, Dr. Bryan Kelly preserved my hip, filling a hole in my femur you could drive a semi though, also after a local doctor told me I needed a full hip replacement and wouldn't run again.

I'm grateful literally every day for what the team at HSS has done for me.