For nearly two decades, Craig Dearth figured his left knee would never get better. Severely injured in a 2006 motorcycle accident, his left leg was a painful pastiche of metal, scar tissue and an arthritic knee.
To function, the knee required Dearth, an Audio Visual Technician with Duke Health Technology Solutions, to spend an hour each morning doing physical therapy exercises and avoid putting too much weight on it.
For years, Dearth figured his damaged leg couldn't support an artificial knee. But in 2024, a Duke doctor offered new hope: rapid advances of artificial joints and surgical techniques might finally make him a candidate.
On the morning of December 9, 2024, Dearth visited the Duke Orthopaedics Arringdon clinic and, later that afternoon, walked out with a new left knee.
"All of those years, I had just been battling through the pain," said Dearth, who, with his Duke health insurance at the time, paid a reasonable outpatient copay for the procedure. "Now I'm free from it."
Last year, roughly 2,500 patients - most dealing with degenerative arthritis or past injuries - come to Duke for partial or total knee replacements using the latest technologies and approaches. Duke has nine surgeons who specialize in knee replacements at four locations in Durham and Wake counties.
Joint Replacement Surgeon Dr. Michael Bolognesi, the Division Chief for Adult Reconstruction for Duke Orthopaedic Surgery , has been performing knee replacements at Duke since 2004. The early surgeries, he said, were mostly inpatient procedures requiring multi-day hospital stays.
But advances in surgical techniques, anesthesia and pain management, along with the rapid evolution of artificial joints, have made same-day outpatient knee replacements safe and effective. Many patients often walk - albeit with assistance - just hours after surgery.
"The most rewarding thing is the ability to help improve people's pain and function," Bolognesi said. "The overwhelming majority of folks do dramatically well with a relatively low instance of complications."
More than a year after his surgery performed by Joint Replacement Surgeon Dr. Sean Ryan, Dearth moves through his day free from pain. He racks up around 8,000 steps most days at work and, in his spare time, he's rediscovered his love of previously difficult activities such as camping and riding a bicycle.
"Before, my knee had put me on the sidelines of what my normal life was," Dearth said. "I had accepted the situation as it was and tried to move forward. But this has made my life better. Quite a bit better."
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