Watch Peyton's story
Transcript
my passion for dance is unbelievable I love it so much it's where I can get my emotions out I've been dancing since I was four I started young obviously and I went to this new studio and I was dancing for a while and my knee started to like swell up and it caused me like a lot of pain the pain was like happening over and over again for about two years went to the hospital and I got a check-up with my knee we got x-rays they told me everything was perfectly fine it was just a sprain a little sprain after that's when I went back to dance so when I was dancing I was still having pain I couldn't go to the floor like my knee like I couldn't train my knee all the way and then we came here to New York I first met Peyton about a year ago and she was 14 and she danced six days a week four to five hours a day and really having a lot of pain in her knee and when her parents came in they said you know this just doesn't seem normal and I said absolutely did not seem normal she'd already failed physical therapy she modified her dance schedule and nothing was making it better and her her injury was fairly unusual it wasn't something that you see every day in a sports medicine practice the way she was born is that her kneecaps were too high so instead of all the stress going through her kneecap the stress was going through the top of her patellar tendon and her fat pad and that meant that we really needed to do an operation to fix it this was not going to get better just with physical therapy so she ultimately underwent what's called a tibial tubercle osteotomy but I distal eyes dit I moved her kneecap down to take the stress off the fat pad and off the tendon and onto the kneecap because that kneecap was put there for a reason it's supposed to be a way to transfer stress when you pull on your quad and as you can see she's done amazingly well the first time we ever met her she knew exactly what was wrong with me the first time I stood up she did checks with my knee she explained it very well she told us step-by-step exactly what she was going to do my recovery time was about we said that it was about to be six to nine months but I've recovered actually pretty fast and I went back to dancing for months dr. Strickland told me that I was going to be able to dance again which I thought I was never going to dance again without pain or anything which scared me because I wanted answer like the rest of my life and when she told me that I almost started crying like that was the best thing that ever happened to me [Music]
After more than 2 years of constant pain and swelling with no real diagnosis, we found Dr. Strickland. Within minutes and with just a look, Dr. Strickland knew exactly what the problem was. I am a competitive dancer and Dr. Strickland assured me that I would be back dancing within 9-12 months pain-free. It was the start of comp season and there was no way that I was going to have surgery then. But after my first competition in February 2018, the pain was unbearable and even though I was scared I decided to move forward with the surgery.
“Within minutes and with just a look, Dr. Strickland knew exactly what the problem was.”
— Peyton Ely
On April 9th I had a tibial tubercle transfer (TTT), which is a pretty invasive surgery to move the patella down into the correct position. I was 6 weeks non-weight bearing, which was really hard as a dancer since I was very active and dancing 6 days a week. I was told I would not be able to dance for 9-12 months, which was really hard to swallow, but I did what I was supposed to do and with lots of hard work and dedication I was back to dancing in 4 months and just had my first competition. No pain whatsoever! I can't thank Dr. Strickland and her whole entire team enough for everything! Simply amazing!!!
