Not this week...

I was planning to update everyone with my stylish looking brace today...but there is no brace.  I have been waiting all week to hear back from the doctor that my brace had arrived.  After waiting around until Thursday afternoon I decided to give the office a call to see what was going on.  What I found out is that the brace was just ordered on Wednesday due to slow insurance approval.  That means I have to wait another week to get my unloader brace. Now, don't get me wrong.  I am not super excited to wear another brace for a few months.  However, the brace will allow me to introduce a little more weight into the joint.

The bike work (ROM) is going well.  After slowly warming up the knee I have finally made a full rotation on the bike at a speedy rate of 15sec/rotation for 15 minutes.  At fifteen minutes it is time to fall off the bike and ice.  That's about all right now.

Carticel Implantation

What is carticel?  


This term is used often for a patient getting readying to undergo ACI.  CARTICEL is a biologic product used to repair articular cartilage injuries in adults who have not responded to a prior arthroscopic or other surgical repair procedure. It uses your body's own cultured cells to form new hyaline-like cartilage in your knee following a surgical procedure called autologous chrondrocyte implantation (ACI). CARTICEL is the name of the cells that are grown from the samples (or biopsy) taken from your knee. When implanted into a cartilage injury, these cells can form new hyaline-like cartilage.

CARTICEL is the first biologic product to repair articular cartilage injuries in the knee. In 1997, it became the only FDA-approved autologous cultured chondrocyte product on the market in the United States. CARTICEL is a product of Genzyme, a company with more than a decade of experience in developing and manufacturing autologous cell therapy products. (Taken from the Carticel website)

How is CARTICEL manufactured?  Here is a quick step by step look at what it takes to clone my knee.  Pretty SCI-FI stuff.

1. A patient's cartilage is harvested by the surgeon and sent to the Genzyme manufacturing facility.
2. The biopsies are processed to isolate chondrocytes from surrounding matrix.
3. Each patient lot is maintained under strict quality control procedures.
4. After primary culturing, patient cells are cryopreserved until an order is placed. This offers flexibility for patients and surgeons to schedule implantation.
5. Once an order is received, the patient's cryopreserved cells are expanded.
6. Two to three days before surgery, CARTICEL vials are released and shipped to the surgeon.

In all it is a pretty interesting process.  If you are interested in knowing more about CARTICEL...take a quick spin around their website: CARTICEL

There are some pretty interesting video spots on the procedure as well.