4 Signs You Possibly Have A Failed Knee Replacement

In this video, I’m going to discuss with you four signs that a knee replacement might fail. If you have any of these signs, it does not mean that for sure your knee replacement has already failed or is going to fail, it’s likely that there’s a chance you can still do things in order to save your knee replacement and get back on track so you can get back to normal again.

I’m Dr. David Middaugh Finn, I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. Please consider subscribing so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post every single week. Let’s get to it.

The number one sign that causes a knee replacement to fail is an infection. If you’ve already had any replacement, I’m sure that you have already heard the word infection so many times from the doctor and anybody related to the surgery, because that’s the last thing that you need to have in your total knee replacement recovery.

The signs of an infection are fever, chills, a sudden increase in pain and stiffness, things change, you’re usually progressing normally, and then suddenly things go south, they go different from what you’ve been experiencing. If you have that kind of experience, then it is urgent that you get medical attention, call your surgeon’s office or follow the instructions that they gave you, they may have told you to go to the hospital or to seek Urgent Care help, because you might need to get on antibiotics ASAP, as soon as possible so that you can battle this infection and prevent the fallout of an infected knee replacement.

Another sign that you might find if your knee replacement was recent, and you still have the wound open is yellow fluid, or pus might be coming out of the wound. That’s definitely a sign of infection. What will happen if your joint replacement gets infected deep inside is you have to go through a painful to stage surgery afterwards. Stage one is where they remove the implants. And they allow the inside of your knee to heal, they’ll put a spacer inside your leg and you cannot walk on that leg for as long as it takes usually weeks two months to be able to recover from the infection.

And then once you fully recover from the infection, then you have another surgery where they go in and put their knee replacement. And again, that’s called a revision. I’ve seen patients over the years that have had to have a revision surgery and it is not fun and the outcome is not the best afterwards. And almost all of them start to say I regret even going down the pathway of having a knee replacement. So if you are looking at possible signs of infection, make sure you take care of it really quick.

The second sign that you might be headed in the direction of a failed knee replacement is severe stiffness in your joints. Ideally, you should be able to see consistent improvements from day one after your surgery to your knees bending more and gradually straightening more, once your knee is all the way straight are within a few degrees of being straight at the very least. And you can bend past 90 degrees, ideally up to 120 degrees, then that’s considered normal range of motion for your knee.

But if you can’t quite get to 90 or a little past 90 degrees, and you can’t straighten out your knee enough to not walk without a limp. And that is of concern. And you could have long term stiffness as a result of this, which might spell disaster for other joints in your body, you might start to get hip problems and that same leg or hip and knee problems on the other leg as well as a result of compensation from your knee not gaining enough motion.

This stiffness sometimes happens without a reason. Most of the time though, it’s because the person that had the knees replacement surgery is just not stretching enough, they’re not getting enough motion to their knee. Or they could also be overdoing it. It is important to find a sweet spot, if you will, of how much stretching you can tolerate, to progress your knee joint range of motion, but also to not overdo it and start to cause swelling and damage to the other tissues inside your knee and limits you from doing more.

It’s also important to take pain medication right after your knee surgery, your surgeon will likely prescribe you a cocktail of pain medication. And you have to take that medication because if you don’t, you could run into the cycle where you are hurting too much to want to stretch as frequently as you need to. And then you start to get stiffnesses as a result of that and then having a stretch with added stiffness is just more painful as well.

So please follow instructions from your surgeon’s office. And if you feel like you’re still in a lot of pain after your knee replacement surgery, which is typical, I mean you just had your joint replaced, you might need to up your pain medication. So talk to your surgeon about that.

The third sign that you might be heading the wrong direction after having a knee replacement is that you feel you can’t walk on your knee after a while you might have been progressing very well usually they’ll make you stand up and walk for the very first day after your knee joint replacement And if suddenly you begin to regress you feel like you it hurts to walk on it, then that’s a sign that you could have a fracture of a broken bone in the bone surrounding the replacement where they put the new prosthesis in the hardware in there, where it attaches to your bones, it could be cracked or broken. And that’s a severe problem, you want to make sure that that heals.

So you have to talk to your doctor’s office, there’s usually things that could be done doesn’t mean that you have to have a knee joint replacement. Again, it might just mean you need to rest and recover, do exercises that don’t involve standing on your leg and weight bearing so that your fracture can heal, and you can salvage your knee replacement.

This is usually a sign of overdoing it. Typically, people that feel really good after their knee replacement or taking other pain medications are progressing very well, they get back to doing more active things than they should. And it leads to the bones cracking and breaking when you shouldn’t be doing that much right after surgery, you need to gradually improve it’s a major operation.

And so you need to take your time and only move as your body allows you to right afterwards. And use guidance from healthcare professionals around you. If you’re right after surgery, within a few months after surgery, you ideally should be going to a physical therapist so that you have personal guidance on what you should and shouldn’t be doing. The fourth sign that you’re near placements going in the wrong direction is instability.

This could be an alignment problem with the knee joint the way that it aligns. And it may not be as a result of the surgery could be something that you did after the surgery away that you moved away that just slept. It could also be that you have loose ligaments in your knee because they don’t replace the ligaments, they’re relying on your ligaments to be intact and working properly. To keep your knee your replaced knee in place. signs of instability are popping and clicking.

Sometimes it’s painful popping and clicking. And you don’t feel like you can trust your leg like it might buckle on you might give out or you just tend to lean over the other side quite a bit and you feel not very confident whenever you go to step on that leg or go up a small, short step, your surgeon might recommend bracing wearing a knee brace to allow the ligaments to heal. And this may also be related to muscle weakness, you may just have already been too weak coming into the surgery, and you need to get stronger.

And it’s just a matter of you gaining strength over time as you recover from your knee replacement for you to gain stability in the knee and be able to trust it when you’re walking, you’re going up and down stairs. Now please keep in mind that it’s rare for anyone who has had a knee joint replacement like this, to have a perfect recovery where it’s painless. The motion comes along so smoothly and they’re walking and dancing and skipping just like the doctor tells them is going to happen.

It’s way more common to have the experience that it is up and down one day you feel miserable the next day you feel fantastic. You regret your decision one day and the next day you’re so happy you made the decision to get a new joiner placement.

It is a roller coaster after having your daughter placement. And it definitely is painful. And it takes time and work for you to earn back all your range of motion and your strength to get back to normal. Again, it’s important for you to pay close attention to what’s going on in your knee as you’re progressing. And if you don’t know what to expect, right after knee joint replacement, we’ve got a video explaining what should happen in the 12 months right after your procedure.

You can go check that video in the description below. It’s linked there and that video will tell you what to expect month by month what you should and shouldn’t see. And if you compare that with the information from this video, I think then you can have a great idea for whether your situation is abnormal or not. And give us a thumbs up if you thought this video was helpful.

And please consider subscribing to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the videos we post every week. If you know somebody that needs to see this video, please share it with them so they can get helpful information as well. Thanks so much for watching. We’ll see you in the next video. Bye