Ruth Norton has been through her fair share of surgeries, but despite everything she still has a smile on her face. In fact, after she found out she needed both knee joints replaced, Norton’s positive attitude may have contributed to saving her life more than once.
“I would go walking up the mountain and back down again two to five miles, five days a week, and it felt great,” said Norton.
“One day on my way down…my right knee. Just searing pain happened out of the blue,”
Her knee seized up and for a few minutes she couldn’t move it. Then she gingerly made her way down and did what a lot of us would do.
“I spent a few days just resting my knee and it felt fine. A few days later, I'm fine. So I went back on my walk, same walk up the hill. On my way down, it happened again. But this time it was my left knee,” she said.
Norton decided it was time to see a doctor, and he told her she needed to replace both knees and change her approach to the pain.
“The first thing people do when they start to have pain and immobility is they want to stop, and that’s really the worst thing that can happen. Your joint has lubricant fluids inside and when you stop moving basically those lubricants stop doing their job,” said Dale Aguirre who manages the ArthroFit program for Intermountain Health’s Orthopedic Specialty Hospital or TOSH.
“Surgery is very traumatic on the body so if we can give someone moving, increase their range of motion, increase their strength, it gives them a better opportunity to recover on the other side of surgery,” said Aguirre.
Norton got two new knees in one surgery and went back to ArthroFit after.
“I came back to ArthroFit as soon as they allowed me to and I haven't left. I can't tell you the difference that this has made for me.
Norton likes to go to TOSH, but she also uses the online program for convenience. Norton is currently in great shape, which is amazing considering she’s been through some major health scares since that knee surgery.
“A year and a half ago, I had an incident where I fainted, and I've never done that. I lost consciousness and hit the ground. I went to see my cardiologist and turned out that I needed open heart surgery immediately. When I talked to the surgeon, who was going to do it, he gave me very little hope of making it through, because it's going to be a difficult surgery, he told me basically get my affairs in order. And that was really a tough time for me,” she said.
Norton made it through, and her cardiologist told her,
“The physical fitness is what brought you through this. That's why you made it. It made me cry. But I realized just how much I love this program. It literally helped me save my life.”
Norton also learned she had breast cancer between her knee replacements and now. She had surgery for that as well, and she’s doing great.
Click here to find out more about Intermountain's ArthroFit program and if it's right for you.
