MEDICS GREW ME A KNEECAP
IN THIS popular regular feature, patients talk readers through what are often pioneering procedures that go on to transform more lives than just their own. Here, actor Rebecca Botten, then 25, told Good Health about a new technique that helped her walk again.
April 11, 2006
MY PROBLEMS began in September 1998 when I was washing my muddy feet in the kitchen sink. I suddenly felt intense pain and screamed in agony.
I didn’t know it then but the awkward position had dislocated my knee and damaged the cartilage inside the joint.
I fell onto the floor, my leg locked in a semi-bent position, and within minutes my knee had swollen to the size of a rugby ball.
I was taken by ambulance to King’s College Hospital in London where doctors tried to straighten my leg and make me walk. But it was too painful. X-rays didn’t show anything, so they thought it was just ‘soft tissue damage’.
After a year of pain and two arthroscopies (keyhole investigations) doctors discovered I had a dislocated knee, a condition known as subluxation. Over the next year, two major operations to correct the problem only made things worse.
In 2003, I was referred to Paul Allen, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Princess Royal
University Hospital in Kent, who wanted to include me in a medical trial.
Called a chondrocyte graft, the procedure would involve removing cells from the back of my kneecap and cloning them in a Petri dish to create a kind of biological putty. This would be used to repair damage behind the kneecap.
In April 200 , they harvested the cells during another arthroscopy. There was a bit of pain afterwards but nothing I wasn’t used to. Three months later I was admitted to Orpington Hospital.
During the one-hour operation they opened up my leg through an eight-inch scar left by a previous procedure.
The physiotherapy started the day after. It was agonising and exhausting. A machine bent my knee gradually while supporting my leg in a sling, and a special ice pack was strapped on four times a day to keep the swelling down.
With every day I could feel the pain easing. When I went home after two weeks they fitted me with a leg brace to stop me twisting the joint and damaging the newly grafted tissues. It looked quite bizarre — friends called it the ‘Robocop leg’ —
but it meant I didn’t worry about falling.
It’s been a slow process and I’ve had to be very careful. The doctors say I am one of their greatest successes so far.