Mindy Aloff

The need for surgery on my right hip was diagnosed in the mid-1990s. The lack of health insurance until 2013 made it necessary for me to wait. By June of 2014, when I had my surgery, I had been in pain every waking minute in both hip joints for two years and was walking with a cane all the time. Dr. Boettner was recommended by professional dancers, the only recommendations I'd listen to for orthopedic surgery of hips and knees. He was called by them "a magician." He certainly proved so with me.

I woke from the epidural without pain and was off the pain pump within 48 hours, never to return to it and rarely to return to Tylenol Extra-Strength, prescribed "as needed." Four days after surgery I was sent to the Burns Rehab Center in Westchester, another dancer's recommendation, where, for five days, I had four intense sessions daily of physical and occupational therapy. Returning to New York, I enjoyed twenty sessions of physical therapy at HSS's Joint Mobility department. Then the Medicare for that for the year ran out, and I stopped going, though I did my prescribed exercises diligently (and still do) at home. For the first month after surgery, I walked with two canes or ambulated in a wheelchair. For the next two months, I walked daily one to two miles using a Rollator or two and then one cane. By the end of the fourth month after surgery, I was carrying one cane "just in case," but only putting weight on it for stair-climbing.

Now, seven months after surgery, I don't carry a cane. I take the subway nearly every day, climbing foot over foot up and down between 50 and 100 stairs. I have no pain in my hips, none at all. It's an absolute miracle, especially when I remember my mother's mother, entirely crippled by arthritis, and my dear mother, also in a wheel chair with arthritis, in both cases in the knees. I'll never be able sufficiently to commend the care I received at HSS: surgical, medical (including very much the administration of the anesthesia), nursing (fabulous), therapeutic, organizational (including the opportunity for a bit of a payment plan). I truly feel as if I've been given back my life.