Press Date: 05/21/2010

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Most of us don't think about getting up from a chair and walking down a hallway, we just take the feet for granted. They are down there and they work but chronic aching feet and ankles can change your life. Tonight, NBC4's Marshall McPeek gives us an inside look into a drastic procedure that can get you walking again.

Tammy Cyrus was in a car accident in 1976.

"My leg was broken in three places and a splinter to the knee."

The bones didn't heal properly and within a few years she ended up with severe arthritis in her ankle. Bones were literally scraping on bones. She had to lean against walls to get up and down stairs. The pain was so bad that it ruined her son's wedding.

"I almost had to leave the reception because I was in so much pain."

That's when she decided it was time to give up on all the other treatments and go for the total ankle replacement.

"Our experience for that has come from hip replacements and knee replacements."

OhioHealth orthopedic surgeon Dr. Thomas Lee says medicine has only really started understanding ankles in the past decade or so thanks to complex computer models that show how ankles truly move. Old school ankle replacement often broke within two years because the metals and plastics couldn't take the focused weight and force.

"It's sort of like taking a paper clip. As you take the paper clip and move it up and down over and over again as many as six to 20 million cycles over a span of ten years any metal can break."

One in 10 led to amputation. New techniques are much more successful using stronger anchors and much better materials.

What's new about it is how we're able to get the metal to bind to the bone and ask the bone to do the lion-share of the energy absorption."

Total ankle replacement patients are often up and walking within six weeks of the surgery almost totally healed within 12. For Tammy it's been like a miracle.

"Now I can go home and make dinner, I can go Christmas shopping, I can go grocery shopping, I can go to a park."

It's reopened her world - she's ready to walk everywhere.