I am a rare breed :)

Earlier, I was looking for the address of my orthopedist's office, because I have a follow up on Wednesday, and I always forget what street he's on. Well, I started perusing his website, and came upon a link for his publications, and I found a few relating to PCL tears, which I thought was pretty cool. I found one article, pubmed link and read through the abstract. What struck me was not the results or clinical significance, but this part: "Between 1980 and 1997 [corrected], 29 patients underwent surgery for isolated PCL injuries at our institution. " That's the same institution where I had my surgery done, which means that in a 17 year period, only 29 patients had the same surgery as me. Granted, that was a long time ago, but the article only came out about 3 or 4 years ago, so there should be some sort of clinical relevance. And this isn't some rinky dink hospital, I went to the Hospital for Special Surgery, which is always voted as number 1 in orthopedics for something like the last million years out of all the hospitals in the country. All they do is orthopedic surgeries. Meanwhile, when it comes to ACL repairs, the hospital website claims that they do over 800 ACL repairs PER YEAR! They probably did in 1 week as many ACL's as they did PCL's in 17 years! How insane is that? And that 29 patients is not the number of patients done by the surgeon himself, it's by all the surgeons at the hospital. I'm glad I didn't know that before the surgery, I'm not sure I would have gone through with it had I known it was that uncommon.