Two nurses walked into Dana Pearson’s room at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center in Vancouver, ready to roll him into surgery.
“Dana, this is the last one, sir,” one nurse said.
In the past year, Pearson, 62, has been undergoing a very rare sequence of medical procedures, said his surgeon, Dr. Todd Borus. When Pearson’s right knee replacement on Halloween concluded, he finished his fourth total joint replacement this year. Pearson began with a right hip replacement in January; a left hip replacement in April followed; then his left knee in August; and finally the right knee.
Borus explained that while some people might replace those four joints in a lifetime, not many do it in less than a year.
“What shocked me was his positive attitude,” Borus says. “He was ready to tackle it.”
Pearson, a Battle Ground resident, has bad joints because of bad genes. As he puts it, he has joints that like to grow bone spurs and squares that don’t fit in holes. His father had both knees replaced, and there’s a history of joint and back pain in his family.
Just a couple days before Pearson’s Halloween surgery, one of his cousins had a right knee replaced by Borus (Pearson joked he should get the “Pearson two-for-one deal”). One day in October a trainer walked by Pearson in his rehabilitation gym at Legacy, and joked: “We’re going to name a wing after him.”
“I feel like I’ve been a revolving door at medical places,” Pearson says.
All the surgeries were paid for by insurance, Pearson says, and he’s had the help of friend and nurse Laura Schlenker to aid him in his recovery. Pearson was Schlenker’s adult youth leader for church when she was growing up.
“I nurtured her. Now she’s nurturing me,” Pearson says.
Pearson has had joint pain for a couple of decades. He explained he should have had surgeries a long time ago, but noted, “I’ve got two grown kids, so there’s life and them and their activities and you’re kind of like, ‘Where do you fit this in?’ ”
He also had both feet reconstructed in a two-year process that began in 2007. Pearson medically retired from Safeway, where he’d worked for nearly 40 years, in 2010.
He’s been on pain medication for quite some time as well. Pearson explained that he’s never felt addicted, but says that the desire to eliminate pain medication from his life was a driving force in the surgeries, which are already starting to make a difference in how he feels.
“I wouldn’t put the old stuff back in. It’s been amazing,” Pearson says.
Pearson fills his time with house chores, and likes watching college football with his son Anthony, with whom he shares a home. His daughter Natalee, who lives in Australia, is visiting to help him recover from this latest surgery. Pearson says he can’t imagine being negative about his outlook, but admits there are tough moments.
“The downside is being limited to do the things you want to do or like to do,” Pearson says. “Even the sunny days we’ve had late in this year, I can see the yard beckoning me to go out and work, but I know it’s not wise for me to do it. I’ve got to pace myself, so I don’t jeopardize my healing.”
The end of physical therapy will be bittersweet for Pearson, since he says he’s going to miss his “little club” he’s formed at Legacy. But he’s got plans for his upgraded body parts. Pearson loves golfing, but had to give that up around 1990 because of pain. And he loves drumming, too, and plays in a Christian band, but has been restricted to the congas for about seven years because the pain has been too strong to play a traditional drum set.
He still keeps his golf clubs and a couple drum sets in his garage. He plans to eventually dust those off to return to his old ways. He joked that when he golfs next he’ll be expecting 1990s prices. And this should be the end of his surgery saga for at least a while.
“Unless I want to have my shoulders done,” Pearson says with a creeping smile.
