Hip & Knee Replacement Blog —
Dr. Cory Calendine

High Ankle Sprain Explained: Why It Is Not a Normal Ankle Sprain

A high #anklesprain is not a worse version of the sprain most people have had - it’s a different injury in a different place. Your ankle depends on the two lower leg bones, the tibia and fibula, staying tightly joined just above the joint. That connection is the syndesmosis, and its ligaments act as a shock absorber every time an athlete lands, cuts, or pivots. A high ankle sprain tears those ligaments. The mechanism is usually a collision or a forced outward twist with the foot flexed upward. Athletes describe pain across the front of the ankle that travels up the leg rather than along the outside, difficulty bearing weight, and trouble pushing off the toes. Bruising may not appear for several days.

In the office we look for pain when the tibia and fibula are squeezed together, tenderness well above the joint line, and pain when the ankle is rotated outward. X-rays rule out fracture, MRI defines the ligament injury, and stress imaging tells us whether the joint is stable. Stability drives the decision. A stable injury is treated without surgery: protected weight bearing, immobilization, and progressive rehabilitation. Recovery is slower than a routine ankle sprain, and returning too soon is the most common reason athletes struggle. When the #syndesmosis is unstable, surgery restores the relationship between the two bones so the ligaments heal in the correct position. Fixation may be a screw across the syndesmosis or a flexible suture button construct, sometimes with arthroscopic assessment of the joint. Flexible fixation permits some natural motion and often avoids a second procedure to remove hardware. If you cannot bear weight after an ankle injury, have it evaluated. A missed high ankle sprain is much harder to treat later.
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🎥 @arthrexmeded - Tightrope™️ repair

Knee Dislocation: The Knee Injury That Can Threaten Your Leg

A knee dislocation is not a bad sprain, and it is not a dislocated kneecap. It is a limb-threatening emergency, and must be taken seriously. In a true knee dislocation, the thighbone (femur) and shinbone (tibia) separate - several major stabilizers usually tear at once: the ACL and PCL, often along with the MCL, LCL, and the posteromedial or posterolateral corner. Most occur with high-energy trauma such as car crashes, dashboard impacts, and falls from a height. Sports injuries can cause them too, and in some patients even a low-energy misstep is enough.
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The real danger sits directly behind the knee - your popliteal artery. This main blood supply to the lower leg, is tethered above and below the joint, so it can stretch, tear, or clot when the bones shift. The peroneal nerve, which lifts the foot and ankle, is also vulnerable, and injury can lead to foot drop. Many #kneedislocations pop-back into place before anyone reaches the hospital, so the knee may look almost normal. A palpable pulse in the foot doesn’t rule-out an artery injury either, because smaller vessels around the knee can mask it. That is why emergency teams check blood flow repeatedly, often with an ankle-brachial index, ultrasound, or CT angiography Treatment starts with prompt realignment and a vascular assessment, followed by stabilization, ligament reconstruction in most cases, and dedicated rehabilitation. If a knee injury comes with gross instability, a cold or pale foot, numbness, or trouble lifting the foot, call 911.

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🎥 @anatomia.repost - knee dislocation injury

🦴 Donated Bone Becomes Your Bone: How Bone Grafts Really Work

Sometimes the best bone for your surgery isn’t your own. When we fuse a joint, fill a gap left by a fracture, or rebuild bone that has been damaged, we often need more bone than your body can spare. That’s where donated bone, called allograft, comes in. It comes from a living donor or, more often, from someone who has passed, and it’s processed into chips, strips, or a moldable putty known as bone matrix. It arrives packed with the natural proteins that signal your body to start building. Think of it less as a replacement and more as a set of instructions. Your own cells move in, follow the blueprint, and over the following months your bone grows straight through the graft until you can no longer tell where it ends and you begin.

#DemineralizedBoneMatrix is rarely rejected, it spares you a second incision to harvest bone from your own hip, and it has been used safely in #orthopedicsurgery for decades. Donors are carefully screened, and the tissue is processed to make disease transmission extremely rare. Every graft is also a gift from someone who chose to donate.

👇 Have you ever had a bone graft, or been told you might need one? Share your experience.

🚿 Can You Shower After Hip Replacement?

The shortest mistake on the list, and the one that surprises people most after hip replacement: the bathtub. You can shower the day you get home (always follow postop instructions from YOUR surgeon). The dressing we typically place in surgery is waterproof, and water can run right over it. A clean, sealed incision handles a shower underneath that dressing just fine - but no soaking. No bathtubs, no pool, no hot tub, not until the incision is completely healed. For most patients that is the 3-4 wk point. A shower runs water over a sealed surface + drains away, but soaking submerges the incision and everything under the dressing edges in standing water for a stretch of time, while the skin is still knitting together. Bath water, pool water, and hot tub water are not sterile, and a hot tub in particular is warm, wet, and shared. Once the incision is fully closed and dry, that risk drops away. Before then, it is not a risk worth taking for a bath you can put off a few weeks.

Leave the waterproof dressing alone unless your surgeon’s team tells you otherwise. Pat the area dry after a shower rather than rubbing it. Skip lotions, ointments, and powders on the incision unless you were told to use them. And if anything changes, do not wait and wonder: increasing redness, drainage from the incision, a fever, or pain that suddenly gets worse are reasons to call your surgeon the same day. You will never bother us by calling. Full discussion at ccmd.pro/mistakes.

👇 SHARE your #hipreplacement recovery experience & tips

Robot Breaks Bolt’s 100m Record, Then Needs a Hip Replacement?

At the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, more than 2,000 humanoid robots from 16 countries competed across 51 events inside the National Speed Skating Oval. The headline came in the 100-meter sprint, where a robot built by Beijing-based X-Humanoid crossed the line in 9.39s, faster than Usain Bolt’s human world record of 9.58s set in 2009. Higher-torque joints, higher-output batteries and better motion-control software made the difference. Not every robot finished on its feet, which brings me to the guest appearance at the end of this clip.

[Not included in this year’s competition...]

The Mako SmartRobotics system doesn’t fix robots, but can help perform #totalhipreplacement in real patients. Here is how it works. Before surgery, a CT scan creates a 3D model of your hip. We use that model to plan implant size, position and alignment, including leg length and hip offset, before the first incision. In the operating room, the robotic arm follows that plan. As we prepare the bone, haptic boundaries keep the reamer inside the planned zone. If we push beyond it, the arm stops. The system also gives real-time feedback on cup inclination, anteversion and leg length, so adjustments happen during the case rather than after. To be clear, Mako does not perform surgery - your surgeon makes every decision and guides every movement. The technology adds precision + reproducibility in implant placement, which matters because component malposition remains a leading cause of dislocation, impingement and early revision - focus on precision, not speed.
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🎥 @cnet , @channelnewsasia
Stryker™️ Mako Total Hip Replacement System