Three weeks to the day after knee-replacement surgery, Teddy Koukoulis wasn’t in bed or propped up on the couch. He wasn’t holding a bag of ice or gutting it out in a tough session of physical therapy. Nope, not Teddy.
Instead, he was at the Country Club of Winter Haven in Central Florida, getting ready to play in his usual golf game. That’s right. Teddy Koukoulis, a then 62-year-old who had battled debilitating knee pain for years before undergoing the life-changing procedure, was about to play his first pain free round in decades.
How was that possible? We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let Teddy finish the story.
“I was thinking, am I about to do something I’m going to regret?” Teddy says. “But I got up on the first tee, hit it solid, and ended up shooting 74. Seriously, a 74. I couldn’t believe it. I put ice on my knee at the end of the round, mostly out of habit, but the next morning I woke up and there was no pain.”
Some 1,200 miles away, at Midwest Orthopedics at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Dr. Richard Berger got a call from Teddy with the incredible news. It was Berger’s groundbreaking surgical procedure that allowed Koukoulis, now 63, to reduce what normally is months of difficult recovery time into just 21 relatively pain-free days.
“Three hours after the surgery, I was walking up and down stairs,” Teddy says.
What’s the secret to Berger’s amazing work? “It’s not proprietary,” Berger says. “I’ll share it with any doctor who wants to learn it.”
Instead of using traditional techniques that involve cutting muscles, tendons and ligaments to reach the bone, Berger’s procedure avoids damaging the soft tissue, which greatly accelerates the recovery time. His educational background, a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and fellowship training as a specialist in adult reconstruction at Rush, helped him develop the tools and method he has since used to perform thousands of knee replacements this way.
Also speeding recovery, Koukoulis says, is the “prehab” exercises and diet recommendations Berger’s staff offers. “They’re literally with you from well in advance of the surgery to the moment they tell you that you’re clear to resume activities, to beyond that.”
Joe Hallet, the PGA of America’s Teacher and Coach of the Year and one of Golf Digest’s 50 Best Teachers in America, says the before and after of Koukoulis’ swing is dramatic. “He was very good before the knee started really ruining his swing. It became too short and too fast. Now the overall smoothness is back.”
The morale of the story, Teddy says, is that if you’re in pain and it’s negatively impacting your activities of daily life, “don’t wait another second to get this surgery.”
For more info on Dr. Berger: outpatienthipandknee.com
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
