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Patient Stories

Hip and Knee Pain Eliminated with Two Joint Replacements

Date posted: 10/23/2025

Last updated: 1/1/0001

Kelly Wavra, 44, of Chicago, enjoys a successful career in pharmaceutical advertising and content development. As a life-long ‘bookworm’ and creative type who majored in English and rhetoric at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she frequently takes walks around her urban neighborhood when not working from her home office.

But until recently, just walking from room to room was extremely difficult and painful.

At age 13, after a year of unusual joint pain, Kelly was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, also called juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). It is an auto-immune disease and a type of arthritis that causes joint inflammation and stiffness in people under 16. It affects approximately 50,000 children in the United States. The inflammation causes redness, swelling, warmth, and soreness in the joints. It can also limit the mobility in the affected joints. In Kelly’s case, she had very swollen knees and ankles, which made it hard to run and play sports.

She and her parents were open to a wide range of medications to control her symptoms and reduce her pain. Some were more successful than others. Around the time she went to college, biologic medications became available, and one in particular gave her great relief for a time. When it no longer worked, she tried steroids,s which caused cataracts in both eyes. Eventually, she switched back to the same biologic medication, which worked again for a period of time. 

From medication to joint replacement

Physicians warned her that the disease was causing damage to her lower body joints and that, in the near future, she would need to undergo multiple joint replacements. They said her body would know when it was time.

That time came during the pandemic in 2020, but Kelly, with a compromised immune system, was not willing to take the risk of a COVID infection.

In 2023, the pain in her left hip and knee became unbearable.

“It was horrifically painful to walk,” she says. “I was basically hauling myself across the room and had become very sedentary. I felt horrible for my cats because I couldn’t play with them.”

Kelly began her research to find the most qualified joint replacement surgeon and discovered Dr. Denis Nam at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush. She scheduled an appointment at his Chicago clinic on the Rush campus. She liked him right away.

Importance of finding the right doctor

“He is very personable, listened carefully to me, and was friendly,” she explains. “Lots of doctors don’t understand I am in the medical field and don’t talk to me as an equal, but he did.”

After an exam and viewing Kelly’s imaging, Dr. Nam thoughtfully explained what he was seeing. She had developed a valgus deformity in her knee. This meant that the joint was angled outward, away from her body's center. It is a condition commonly known as knock-knee. He also observed that the ‘ball’ of her hip joint had eroded to the point where it was barely evident. The combination of her valgus knee deformity and hip arthritis was causing the severe pain and malalignment of her left leg.

He recommended a total joint replacement in both her hip and knee. “Fortunately, the incidence of young patients requiring total joint replacements due to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis has significantly decreased due to the improvement in biologic medications,” Dr. Nam explains. “But the severity of Kelly’s disease plus her debilitating symptoms made left hip and knee joint replacements inevitable.”

Home the same day — twice

Kelly agreed to both surgeries and opted to undergo a hip replacement first. Dr. Nam performed the successful outpatient surgery at Rush Medical Center in Chicago and after Kelly walked a bit, she went home the same day. For a couple of weeks, she had physical therapists come to her home, then progressed to visiting a physical therapy clinic in the neighborhood. She experienced no pain and recovered quickly.

She was ready for her knee replacement surgery just three months later, and like her hip replacement, walked shortly after surgery, and returned home the same day. This time, she stayed at her best friend’s home to get a little extra care. Just a short while afterward, she was completely pain-free.

“I am so thankful that I live in a time when rheumatoid arthritis is treated so differently than it used to be,” Kelly says. “Years ago, I probably would have been left to suffer.”

She is forever grateful to Dr. Nam and his team , too.

“Dr. Nam’s team was amazing,” she says. “Anything I needed, paperwork, questions, it never took more than one call for them to help me. They even diagnosed an allergic reaction I had to an antiseptic used on my leg during my hip replacement. Dr. Nam’s nurse recommended an over-the-counter medication that treated the outbreak.”

Today, Kelly regularly walks a mile for pleasure and can’t even tell she has two joint replacements. “I actually have to remind myself that I have implants.”

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