Mr. Howard Michael Grosch

The operation result was... far exceeded my expectation. Right now, uh, it's what, three weeks or a month after the surgery, I went shopping for three hours. So I was doing lots of things.

Howard Michael Grosch. I'm from Canada, and now I live in Thailand. I injured my knees many times. I played ice hockey in Canada, and doctors told me when I was 30 years old that when I got older, I would have knee problems. By the time I hit 65, I couldn't run anymore. The doctors in Canada said I need to replace both knees. And Canada would have been free for the surgery, but there was a backlog of five years.

I had visited Thailand a few years ago. I liked it here. I knew I was going to get the operation here, and I knew I'd have to pay for it. I'm a researcher, I have a PhD, so I check everything out. I know to do knee surgery, you have to go through a lot of pain, so I phoned up the hospital in Pattaya to do it. I knew that if I didn't do both at once, I wouldn't come back for the second one. But I told him that I wanted both, I insisted, you know? And he was looking just in my best interest, and that's what impressed me. I could tell that he cared—it wasn't a money thing, he was looking for me to be the best and easiest way to do it.

I knew within the first week in the hospital that I could walk. I waited two, three days after the operation before I tested anything, because I wanted the knees to heal. And the next day, when the doctor came, I asked him if it was all right if I tried standing up—even though I'd already done it! And he said yes, if it doesn't give you pain. He told me his advice was anything I do, as far as what I do, it's the pain element that's important.

So I was doing lots of things and putting pressure on the knee, but within this, I was also walking, and I was climbing stairs and going up and down ramps with no pain. And I've been back to my normal life. You have to consider it's not just a choice of money, it's a choice of style of life. If you're going to be sitting at home and not being able to walk, then to me, you don't have a life.