Copying it here from the old forum. I think this is worth reading/discussing.
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Hello, just thought I would give everyone an update on the status of my treatment and the Precice. I arrived home on March 12 from the hospital and have been walking for about 2 weeks now. The results of my last x-ray before discharged showed the left femur being at 4.2 cm and the right 4.5 cm. I still feel some stiffness and pain in my hips especially when I try to walk moderate to long distances. I do feel sometimes when I walk that I may have quite a bit more of a discrepancy than what the x-ray showed due to my left leg wanting to sort of drag and a sharp pain I feel in the right hip/buttock. It's still relatively early though in the recovery so I'm going to give it some more time before I jump to any conclusions and try to continue to stretch more. Other than this everything seems to be ok physically. As for emotionally I'm not quite sure. I'm very disappointed I was so far away from reaching my target gain which was 7.5-8cm. I actually probably would have been ok with 6-6.5 considering what I got. So far I've barely gone out in public at all. I haven't seen or spoken to any of my friends or exes since before I went to South Korea. I fear that the full negative effects of this will not be felt until I recover enough and inevitably start to venture out again into society and attempt to ease back into my social life and other situations that will likely arise. I think that's when it will hit the hardest. I realize there maybe a lot of readers that think I should try to be more positive about this situation and be thankful for what I got and I appreciate that. I do try but ironically that's a very tall order given the circumstances. "It is what it is" in my opinion.
As for the situation with Dr. Lee, the Precice, and Ellipse technology in regard to remedial action no one has contacted me. I was told when I was in the hospital twice that the VP or someone from California was coming to Korea to investigate and attempt to rectify the problem. The day they were suppose to meet with me a rep from the local distributer in Korea showed up with a note pad. He apologized that the guy from California that was suppose to be there was in another country on business and that he would probably come the following Friday or weekend (no one showed up then either) and that he was there to take down any complaints I had to convey them to him. I told him exactly what Dr. Lee told me which was that the device had stopped working and this was most likely due to a mechanical failure or that the distraction force of the device was not strong enough to overcome the muscles surrounding the femurs. Not from premature consolidation. This is also stated on a medical certificate I received that I had requested from Dr. Lee before my discharge as well as copies of all my x-rays which according to Dr. Lee clearly show that premature consolidation was not the cause of the Precice failure to distract. If Sysop is ok with the idea I'll be happy to post copies of the medical certificate as well as the x-rays here in my diary or perhaps another section of the forum. Another thing I recall was that the week before I left ( Dr. Lee had already gone to the Severance hospital well before I left.) another doctor that was assisting the resident in taking care of us by the name of Dr. Ryue had several conversations with me. He told me in one conversation that Dr. Lee was flying to the US a couple days before I was leaving to attend some sort of conference with Ellipse technologies and that my case was going to be discussed and that someone would be in contact with me. This has not happened either. Since then I have attempted to e-mail Dr. Lee weeks ago and have received no response. I have also called Ellipse technologies twice and was told someone would contact me. Again no response.
As for the options I was offered as possible solutions by Dr. Lee were to remove the nail and replace it with a new one or remove the nail and use a monorail fixator to complete the lengthening. Or as he mentioned a possible refund for the nails. At one point he suspected both nails were defective which could have been true since the right nail was lengthening but at a very slow rate towards the end of treatment. At one point it seemed to have almost stopped completely or it had lengthened like 1 mm over the course of a week, but then started to slowly lengthen a bit more in the following weeks. Until I had to stop to avoid a big discrepancy due to the left nail stopping completely. I would have been fine with either of the first 2 options but Dr. Lee said the cost would be about the same as the first surgery to replace the nail and to do the monorail at the Severance hospital they could not say exactly what the cost would have been but It would have been impossible considering most of everything I had went towards the first surgery. I asked Dr. Lee if there was anything he could do to help with the cost of these surgeries and he said no because it was up to the hospital and he had no control of it. Now that I think about it I'm not even sure the first option I was offered would have worked since there was no follow up on if a replacement nail would have even been provided free of charge.
In the past several weeks I have been speaking with several legal experts in California about this matter. I really don't know what else to do now. I was hoping this would not be necessary and Ellipse and possibly some of the doctors here could come up with some sort of solution but things are not exactly looking very well. It would seem in order to continue lengthening again all that would be required would be to re break the right femur and replace the nail in the left femur with a new one and re break it. It would only take maybe a little more than a month to finish lengthening if even that. The only question would be the cost. If I knew Ellipse would consider helping me with this I'd be the happiest guy in the world and gladly sign anything they wanted but thus far they have made no efforts to rectify anything or shown any empathy nor compassion. They have not offered to refund the nail, they have not offered to replace the nail, or anything period. They refuse to even acknowledge my existence. Yet they were notified by Dr. Lee that there was a problem and one of their nails failed after a patient spent his life savings almost and had to borrow money from his father, had both his legs broken, and was disabled for several months. What does that tell you about them? I really hope this doesn't happen to anyone else.
One of the experts I spoke with gave me this website associated with the FDA. It shows there have been other complaints about the Precice as well.
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfMAUDE/results.cfm
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Topic: Wolverine's Post on Precice (Read 4033 times)