Diane Kowalski

For most of my fifties I told myself the ache in my knees was just what happens to a woman who spent decades on her feet, raising kids in the suburbs west of Chicago and standing all day at work. I iced them, I complained, and I quietly stopped doing the things that hurt, which turned out to be most of them.

When I finally saw an orthopaedic surgeon, two things surprised me: how much of my pain was osteoarthritis that had a name and a plan, and how differently it tends to show up in women than the leaflets seemed to assume. I tried the conservative route for a good while, and when I did have my right knee replaced at 61, the surgery itself was the short part. The recovery, the questions nobody warned me about, and the slow work of trusting the joint again were the long part.

I built Illinois Healthy Women to gather what no one handed me at the start: clear, specific information about women’s knees and bones, written by someone who has been through it. A board-certified orthopaedic surgeon checks the medical side so the facts hold up. I am not a doctor; I am a patient who learned a lot and wanted the next woman to spend less time confused and afraid than I did.