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[Penguinn]

It's so strange that a for-profit place could be so unethical, just thinking business wise it isn't very smart.
I really hope you end up ok! It seems like you're on the right track 

[lucindaris]

It's so emotional  hope everything goes well

[cobalt]

I'm glad your hospital experience improved. Your update is very detailed and eye opening. Your case experience and sharing will help alot of others from same fate if they can avoid it, thankyou for sharing your honest feelings. Wish you a smooth recovery.

[4cms]

This doctor is all about the money , he took a deposit from me for a surgery booked 1 month in advance and when i backed out he did not return the whole deposit.
Just seeing that turned me off this doctor.

[4cms]

This doctor charges absurd amounts of money and asks his patients to do the work.
He is already charging you over $50,000 usd then has the nerve to charge her for complications which were the result of his negligent surgery and rubbish nail.

I done surgery with Dr Sarin in 2012 and i didnt have any complications and even if i did he doesnt charge you for it.
No
Dr guichet is a crook if you ask me.

The real hero and warrior in this is the patient,  look at all the doctors in russia and india they get the same results for a 3rd of the money.

[4cms]

Guichet is easily compared to the butchers of India. And he is a way worse case as his prices compare to top doctors like Rozbruch.

Only a moron would go to Guichet. He is mayve the worst case of LL doctor out there.

I tried to warn people about guichet on the old forum  and no one listened to me in fact sysop/apothesis tried to black mail and threaten me for some reason i think they had some sort of business deal.
Guichet should be removed off the doctors list and a warning to all LLers be issued on this forum.

[AlphaX]

Hello Unicorn,

(sorry my english  is not very good)

I hope you are well,
I wish to write you a message because it would be selfish for me not to do so in view of all the help that your experience has given me.

Before taking cognizance of this forum, I had the project to be operated by Dr. Guichet to gain + 7cm on my shins (according to him you can go up to 9-10 on the shins without taking risks LOL).
For more than 1 years I only knew this doctor, I thought it was the only one to offer this type of surgery so I was very motivated to the idea of ​​having me operated by him, I had already passed the medical tests etc ..

Subsequently (and I thank god), I discovered this forum and all these riches, I even discovered that we could be operated on femurs. You can not even imagine how happy it was to find this community.

I was so happy that I directly posted a message on any topic to talk about my project. You can check, this is my first post on the forum where I even took out the sentence "The only one that is really seduced me (before arriving on this forum) is Dr. Guichet."

Thanks to you, I probably avoid a big mistake. I don't know what would happen if I did not read your story or read the Veterans posts about it.
I don't know if Dr. Guichet remains a good doctor despite everything. But I know that someone who offer 7-10 cm on the shins without talking about ALL the risks that it leads to medium and especially LONG TERM is a b***h.
Just the idea of ​​offering this type of service makes me crazy.Same talk for Dr. Betz who in his great genius can save you 10-12 cm on your shin LOL.

Nevertheless, today I do not know how to give you the service that you have done testifying to your experience, but know that my mother thanks you just like me.
I sincerely hope that everything will be better for you, I will follow your story with interest. But never forget that when everything goes wrong in your life, things can only get better.
Just be patient and never give up so believe it!

[Petite888]

Stay strong honey. Each step is a step closer to recovery! You WILL walk again!!

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

Someone alerted me that there's a post somewhere that I did 2mm/day.

Unicorn lengthened 2mm/day, when the recommended maximum is 1mm.

Unicorn is a sharp lady, but unfortunately she either wasn't aware of this, or believed Guichet over Paley, or didn't have the strength to stand up to Guichet and not lengthen more than 1mm/day.

Just to set the record straight, Guichet lengthen his patients about 5mm to 1cm during the initial osteotomy surgery.  Then for the first 2 weeks, his schedule is about 1.5mm per day and one reaches about 3cm by Week 2.  If we didn't follow his schedule, we get screamed at and verbally abused.  Also, we didn't know better about the distracting process.  We were told that lengthening lasts 2 months and 1 month of recovery, and then boom!  You're discharged fully recovered to go back to work and your friends/family without anyone the wiser.  Well, this is all BS!  That's how ignorant and naive we were.  Most of us never recovered within those times and even the successsful ones took 1.5-2 years to recover normal walking gait and get rid of their lordosis/duckass.

That's why during my 3rd surgery to lengthen my left leg, I decided to just wait 1 entire week before starting to lengthen and avoided Guichet's screaming phonecalls and abusive voicemails.  When I finally saw him, he was infuriated that I had not started clicking yet 1 week post surgery.  So he MADE ME sit in his office to click 1cm that day.  I was not allowed to leave until I finished about 150 clicks.  It took about 4 hours and I was crying nonstop because he said I deserve the suffering for not obeying his schedules.  My reasoning was that we already established that I'm a slow fuser and my right leg is already non-union, so WHY RUSH on the left leg?  It just makes zero sense.  But he wouldn't listen to reasoning anymore and was angry that I had no money to pay him for the new nail he installed in my left leg because he had broken my nail in the operating room himself.  And he wanted £37k.

This is why I'm hiding today.  I'm so scarred by that experience.  And as I told you guys here, I opened my bandages to show him oozing green and yellow wounds and asked him if it were normal and could he please prescribe antibiotics.  He dismissed it saying his nails are green in colour and if the oozing persists, he'll give me antibiotics in a week's time.

I went straight from his office to Chelsea & Westminster emergency room and they were so shocked to find me in such abandoned condition, they quickly cleaned up my oozing wound sites and then hospitalized me right away with a strong antibiotic drip.  By then, my skin had broken underneath (erythema) because the 1cm was too much for the soft tissues to stretch in one day.

So PLEASE do not judge until you've been through this process yourself.  It's so easy to sit on the sidelines and hurl opinions when as a patient, you are so confused/in pain/trauma to discern if your doctor is actually making the wrong calls.  Remember that we paid a high price for one of the best hospitals in London and their selection of orthopedists to ensure the best outcome.  So we did believe everything Guichet said and all of us only realized in hindsight how much we were being deluded.

Hence, my diary.  I want each and every potential LLer to be smarter than I was when I leaped into the surgery with only a hope and a prayer.

[doomsday]

how is your walking after itb release?

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

how is your walking after itb release?

The IT band release literally solved a lot of my lordosis.  Suddenly, I can stand so much straighter with very little duckass left.

The left knee drainage also removed my chronic knee pain.  So my walking gait is non-valgus, straight legs BUT leaning side to side.  The reason is my glutes are still too weak to propel my hips and legs forward like a normal person.  But I’m working hard on that, so I see miraculous small improvements everyday.

Sometimes I get off my seat to open a door or fetch something from the fridge and realize later that I had forgotten to use my crutches.  It is a very liberating wonderful feeling to have my legs support me unaided again.

My current pain is in the non-union grafted gap area of abt 10cm.  It hurts a lot esp when I wake up from 8hrs of innactive sleep.  I sometimes take a spoonful of morphine and keep crutching to alleviate this excruciating bone achiness.  I hope it’s my bone army building a bridge over the graft to fuse.  In any case, pain is better news than no sensation at all (due to nonunion)

https://www.instagram.com/unicorn_gets_taller/

[tallertree]

Terrible what happen to you Unicorn. Im glad that you are making progress at least. You seem to be a fighter so i believe you will recover from this faster than you think.

I recently had surgery done on my femurs and everything has been fine so far, im still lengthening. Do you have any recommendations for people who does this surgery, that you have learned from yours? like, things to avoid etc. Im around 3cm right now and i do 15 clicks per day wich is like 0.7mm or so.

[OverrideYourGenetics]

Someone alerted me that there's a post somewhere that I did 2mm/day.

Just to set the record straight, Guichet lengthen his patients about 5mm to 1cm during the initial osteotomy surgery.  Then for the first 2 weeks, his schedule is about 1.5mm per day and one reaches about 3cm by Week 2.  If we didn't follow his schedule, we get screamed at and verbally abused.

I made the 2mm/day claim, and thanks for correcting me. I still think the lengthening process you described above is crazy, and I'm shocked to hear about the verbal abuse

We were told that lengthening lasts 2 months and 1 month of recovery, and then boom!  You're discharged fully recovered to go back to work and your friends/family without anyone the wiser.  Well, this is all BS!

This PRECICE patient of Dr. Mahboubian lengthened for 2 months and is walking unaided quite well 1 week after he stopped lengthening. He weighs 120lbs, 50% more than what the PRECICE is rated for.

[YellowSpike]

Unicorn, what is the prognosis following your surgery? Do they believe there is a good chance that this will help your leg heal and form a bone bridge?

You are doing really well, better than you realize. Keep at it. You'll be out of the woods sooner than you think.

Also, just wanted to add - had you went through what you went through, and I read your diary before I scheduled my surgery - I would have definitely picked a different doctor. My experience was obviously very different than yours. I didn't have any complications (still have to get the rods out still, though) and he was very different with  me...but yeah...reading your diary and your recent posts...I would have done the surgery elsewhere.

[totallyred]

Hey Unicorn, first of all best wishes for the recovery.
 I just read your diary. I strongly believe your non-union may be that due to the reason that significant percentage of your original bone is occupied by the nail, leaving little   of this bone to regenerate new bone.  In other words as you said that initially the callus was forming but later in just backed down, this may tell that your existing bone mass could have formed new bone upto a certain length, when  you crossed that limit the bones did not bother to fill the gap as if they knew they would not have succeeded anyways in fully bridging the gap.

So i just wanted to ask/suggest, did you consider either taking the rod out and putting instead a thin rod or reducing the distance between  the segmens by shortening the rod(if that is possible) or any other method in which bones would not have to make so much of new bone mass. I know taking out and putting in rod could be really dangerous esp seeing your frail bones but I guess it would have saved you from lot of trauma..

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

Terrible what happen to you Unicorn. Im glad that you are making progress at least. You seem to be a fighter so i believe you will recover from this faster than you think.

I recently had surgery done on my femurs and everything has been fine so far, im still lengthening. Do you have any recommendations for people who does this surgery, that you have learned from yours? like, things to avoid etc. Im around 3cm right now and i do 15 clicks per day wich is like 0.7mm or so.

Just make sure you xray every 2 weeks and check that your callus fingers are bridging.  That's the only thing to look out for.  If the calluses are not growing, you should stop or slow down your clicks.

Everyone is different.  You could be a fast fuser and it might mean clicking even more to ensure you don't fuse before you reach your desired height.  You can always PM me your xrays, ok?  And I can give you an opinion then.  Whenever you feel in doubt, seek a 2nd opinion.  That's the safest approach.

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

This PRECICE patient of Dr. Mahboubian lengthened for 2 months and is walking unaided quite well 1 week after he stopped lengthening. He weighs 120lbs, 50% more than what the PRECICE is rated for.

Yes, we had the same for a 19 year old guy in our class.  After lengthening for 2 months, he fused asap/too fast, and was back to walking normally after reaching about 6.5cm immediately.

Everyone is different but remember that the older you get, your genetics, your gender and your race will make a difference.

I am confident this surgery can be safely done for everyone, with the right checks in place.

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

Unicorn, what is the prognosis following your surgery? Do they believe there is a good chance that this will help your leg heal and form a bone bridge?

Don't know, will see surgeon this Friday.  Having severe pains in the grafted area and right knee pains now.  She said that 2 months is the minimum to see if my body accepts the graft.

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

Hey Unicorn, first of all best wishes for the recovery.
 I just read your diary. I strongly believe your non-union may be that due to the reason that significant percentage of your original bone is occupied by the nail, leaving little   of this bone to regenerate new bone.  In other words as you said that initially the callus was forming but later in just backed down, this may tell that your existing bone mass could have formed new bone upto a certain length, when  you crossed that limit the bones did not bother to fill the gap as if they knew they would not have succeeded anyways in fully bridging the gap.

So i just wanted to ask/suggest, did you consider either taking the rod out and putting instead a thin rod or reducing the distance between  the segmens by shortening the rod(if that is possible) or any other method in which bones would not have to make so much of new bone mass. I know taking out and putting in rod could be really dangerous esp seeing your frail bones but I guess it would have saved you from lot of trauma..

Yes, thank you for your suggestion.  That is the plan if my bone graft fails.  The grafting method is THE LEAST invasive of the several solutions out there since it has been 2 years now and my 4th surgery.

Because my femurs were over reamed to ram in the 13mm nail, you're right, there are very little to no bone matrices/living cells left to consolidate.  Hence, as you say it, it is too far for the calluses to bridge, so they can't even be bothered.

Hence, if this grafting fails, the surgeon will remove the large g-nail, and implant a thinner Precice Unyte that will be pre-lengthened to 8cm, and we'll slowly shorten me until my calluses join.  And when it does, I will be lengthened back to 8cm.

We're just trying to avoid more unnecessary surgeries like shortening etc. because remember, my goal was not 10cm.  It's because the g-nail cannot stop and cannot reverse.  So when you suffer from non-union holding the nail in place, it can click very easily with every knee movement.  Hence, my doctor called it runaway lengthening.

It has happened to another girl who had one non-union leg that ranaway too and unfortunately, because the leg length disparity is too much between the fused and non-union legs, she had to do a shortening surgery.

I'm just hoping this is my last surgery (besides the nail removal).  I'm sooooo tired of myself and looking at my frankenstein scar riddled legs.  Instead of celebrating my height, I'm purely exhausted from how much trauma it has caused me (mentally/physically) and how it's made my life a living nightmare

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

Just make sure you xray every 2 weeks and check that your callus fingers are bridging.  That's the only thing to look out for.  If the calluses are not growing, you should stop or slow down your clicks.

Everyone is different.  You could be a fast fuser and it might mean clicking even more to ensure you don't fuse before you reach your height.  You can always PM me your xrays, ok?  And I can give you an opinion then.  Whenever you feel in doubt, seek a 2nd opinion.  That's the safest approach.

THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT - CALLUS FINGERS BRIDGING (not my leg)



THIS IS WHAT YOU DON'T WANT - NO CALLUSES - NON-UNION (my right leg)

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

This doctor is all about the money , he took a deposit from me for a surgery booked 1 month in advance and when i backed out he did not return the whole deposit.
Just seeing that turned me off this doctor.

It was the same for most of us.  I never got my £3k surgery deposit back because he claims I owe him even more for the new nail he implanted in me when he broke my nail.

My other classmate was told he came to the gym a week before for pre-op training and that was £3k.

And another classmate was told that he will apply the £3k to his nail removal cost.  That classmate was so disgusted, he got his nails removed by Rozbruch who then applied a discount for him because of his UK experience.  So that was very magnanimous of Rozbruch.

And I'm just scratching the surface here in terms of unscrupulousness.

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

It's so strange that a for-profit place could be so unethical, just thinking business wise it isn't very smart.
I really hope you end up ok! It seems like you're on the right track 

It's the same as prison systems in the US.  When it's private, everything's crap because it all boils down to the bottom line.  They need to turn a profit, so every dollar and cent counts, hence, cutting every corner they can.

And my London hospital where Guichet operated on me is the largest hospital group in the world and publicly quoted on the NYSE with a $36bn market cap.  https://hcahealthcare.com/home/

[Penguinn]

It's the same as prison systems in the US.  When it's private, everything's crap because it all boils down to the bottom line.  They need to turn a profit, so every dollar and cent counts, hence, cutting every corner they can.

And my London hospital where Guichet operated on me is the largest hospital group in the world and publicly quoted on the NYSE with a $36bn market cap.  https://hcahealthcare.com/home/

But that's the beauty of the free economy, when things are private. LL patients are consumers and doctors are suppliers.

He might have extracted more money from people in the short run by being a d0uche, but your diary's warned people and he's probably lost a lot of patients because of the stuff you revealed. In the long run, he's only shooting himself in the foot. If a privately owned hospital won't be ethical and caring because they have morals, they should at least do so out of business sense. Alas.

Anyway, I'm glad to see you're in good hands. Pretty sure your femurs and you will come out of this in one piece

[Tangled]

Same here. Internally and externally scarred. I don't know what's worse.

[OverrideYourGenetics]

But that's the beauty of the free economy, when things are private. LL patients are consumers and doctors are suppliers.

He might have extracted more money from people in the short run by being a d0uche, but your diary's warned people and he's probably lost a lot of patients because of the stuff you revealed. In the long run, he's only shooting himself in the foot.

I'm a free market supporter generally, but the problem is that leg lengthening is an information asymmetric market, even though us here on the forum might find it hard to believe that people don't research the heck out of this procedure before embarking on it. Truth is, many patients simply trust the doctors (for whatever reason) and don't read patient diaries, let alone the ones that might expose them; or exhibit confirmation bias and discard negative opinions. What we have here is an example of market failure, where regulation might actually help - say if there were some sort of commission that investigated complaints and withdrew the doctor's license if the complaints were founded.

[IwannaBeTaller]

even though us here on the forum might find it hard to believe that people don't research the heck out of this procedure before embarking on it.

Even if you research "the heck out of it", sometimes there simply isn't enough information available to get an adequately informed view. Before Unicorn's case, one most likely could not know the unethical behaviour and malpractice of a renowned surgeon like Guichet, because there was no diary around showing the potentially horrible consequences of this malpractice. Sure, right now we have more information than two years ago, if you know how to find it (by knowing this forum or Unicorn's story). But would we need another botched surgery so that we could know which LL doctor to avoid next? God bless this kind "free market" then. 

[Penguinn]

But would we need another botched surgery so that we could know which LL doctor to avoid next? God bless this kind "free market" then. 

Well that would happen either way. It's not the free market's fault. How would an authority figure dismiss/blacklist a qualified doctor without seeing any bad cases?

[Unicorn888 by Elaine Foo]

I'm a free market supporter generally, but the problem is that leg lengthening is an information asymmetric market, even though us here on the forum might find it hard to believe that people don't research the heck out of this procedure before embarking on it. Truth is, many patients simply trust the doctors (for whatever reason) and don't read patient diaries, let alone the ones that might expose them; or exhibit confirmation bias and discard negative opinions. What we have here is an example of market failure, where regulation might actually help - say if there were some sort of commission that investigated complaints and withdrew the doctor's license if the complaints were founded.

I think perhaps one regulation that's out there for CLL is Precice, right?  It's FDA approved which is quite a rigorous process to get through.

I'm in no way a promoter or sponsor of Precice but I'm just saying that Stryde will revolutionize LL forever.

Every case CAN be with less trauma, suffering, pain and non-union if :
-  Stryde is used (no more torturous manual clicking / weight bearing maintains muscle mass)
-  Callus formation is priority (nail reversal and stopping if bone consolidation is at risk)
-  Lengthening rate is monitored closely
-  Proper soft tissue stretching techniques are diligently followed from Day 1 (quads, hips, hamstrings, IT band)
-  Adequate painkillers are used

Then one day, CLL will really become a common goal for everyone.  Baby steps but we're getting there, all of us in this forum, sharing and learning from each other.

https://www.instagram.com/unicorn_gets_taller/?hl=en

[myloginacc]

The IT band release literally solved a lot of my lordosis.  Suddenly, I can stand so much straighter with very little duckass left.

The left knee drainage also removed my chronic knee pain.  So my walking gait is non-valgus, straight legs BUT leaning side to side.  The reason is my glutes are still too weak to propel my hips and legs forward like a normal person.  But I’m working hard on that, so I see miraculous small improvements everyday.

Sometimes I get off my seat to open a door or fetch something from the fridge and realize later that I had forgotten to use my crutches.  It is a very liberating wonderful feeling to have my legs support me unaided again.

My current pain is in the non-union grafted gap area of abt 10cm.  It hurts a lot esp when I wake up from 8hrs of innactive sleep.  I sometimes take a spoonful of morphine and keep crutching to alleviate this excruciating bone achiness.  I hope it’s my bone army building a bridge over the graft to fuse.  In any case, pain is better news than no sensation at all (due to nonunion)

https://www.instagram.com/unicorn_gets_taller/

Awesome to hear about your recent improvements!

[OverrideYourGenetics]

I think perhaps one regulation that's out there for CLL is Precice, right?  It's FDA approved which is quite a rigorous process to get through.

Correct. This is the FDA approval for STRYDE. Though the European Medicines Agency should have something to say about the Guichet and Fitbone nails, I have no idea if they have been through any sort of approval process.

I'm in no way a promoter or sponsor of Precice but I'm just saying that Stryde will revolutionize LL forever.

Every case CAN be with less trauma, suffering, pain and non-union if :
-  Stryde is used (no more torturous manual clicking / weight bearing maintains muscle mass)
-  Callus formation is priority (nail reversal and stopping if bone consolidation is at risk)
-  Lengthening rate is monitored closely
-  Proper soft tissue stretching techniques are diligently followed from Day 1 (quads, hips, hamstrings, IT band)
-  Adequate painkillers are used

Then one day, CLL will really become a common goal for everyone.  Baby steps but we're getting there, all of us in this forum, sharing and learning from each other.

Agree with all of the above. Regarding painkillers, I do hope cannabis will be incorporated in the regimen, so patients can have an alternative to opioids.

[myloginacc]

Unicorn, do you happen to know, or have any insight, as to how limb lengthening is done within the NHS?

Their process seems different from cosmetic, external fixator doctors. In this instance, it seems the NHS doctors would lengthen 4.5cm (~1.8in) over 2 years, doing an osteotomy on the bone twice rather than just once. At least, that's what I gathered from the main post. I wonder if it's supposed to be safer this way?

I hope you've been well.