San Francisco resident Shahnam Davani stopped suddenly on the sidewalk on Montgomery Street in the city’s financial district. He couldn’t move. His hip was frozen, a culmination of eight months of escalating pain.
He was shocked. “That was a neighborhood that I had marched up from the 1990s to the 2000s for business and work,” he says. “That was the breaking point.”
Although only 45 years old, Shahnam couldn’t climb stairs, walk without pain or do many of the daily activities that were vital to his life. The worst part was that he could no longer play with his 5-year-old boy. “I was just mad that at this age I couldn’t even do a cycling ride or play baseball with my son,” he recalls.
Shahnam’s doctor at CPMC, orthopedic surgeon Christopher Cox, M.D., took an MRI and discovered that there was no cartilage left in his hips. It was bone-on-bone. Shahnam’s doctors recommended that he consider a less invasive hip replacement surgery that’s geared toward active people — one that may give him a faster recovery.
Deciding to have surgery was not something Shahnam took lightly. But he quickly said to his wife, “When I have access to such great people and great facilities, I have to get this done.”
Naturally, he still felt some nervousness about going into surgery, but it quickly disappeared once he arrived at the hospital. “The surgeon comes and sits down with me and talks to me like I’ve known him — like my uncle — for a long time. It was so comforting. I could just see it in his eyes — people care!”
Shahnam felt a deep trust for his doctor and care team at CPMC, and sure enough, on the same day of his surgery, he was up and walking. “It was just phenomenal,” he says. And that personal attention didn’t stop there. “The partnership was as smooth as possible from inside the hospital to setting up my in-home care.”
His team then helped him prepare for his recovery, which went much faster than he could have ever imagined. Two days after surgery, he was home, and by the third day he stopped using his cane.
Most importantly, he can now play with his son again. “Every day is a sunny day,” he muses. “Every weekend we put our bikes in the car, and we go down to the Marina Green, and every night I’m chasing him in the house. Life is good.”
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