"I was crippled before and I'm not now." - Vicki Sutcliffe, Kansas City, MO

Vicki Sutcliffe, Gladstone, Mo., didn’t want to have knee replacement surgery, but she was in a lot of pain and had limited mobility. Then she talked to the people at Kansas Regenerative Medicine Center. They used her body’s very own stem cells as therapy to restore Vicki’s mobility and give her a fuller life.

Here is how she describes her journey:

If I had a pain scale from 1 to 10, I thought, “Oh my God, mine was a 20!” But I knew that I didn’t want to have my knees replaced, because I had gone through that with my husband and I saw how difficult it was.

Then I saw something on Facebook about stem cells. I live north of the river in Kansas City, and there was a place that wasn’t very far from my house. They had a little one-hour thing where you can go in for free and they’ll talk to you about it. It was a thing that was frozen and it came from someplace in Kansas. They shipped it in. I felt like they were used car salesmen, and I didn’t like that. It was just a funny feeling in my stomach. I’m kind of one of those people who, if I shake someone’s hand and I have that sick feeling in my stomach, I just know that’s not for me. So, then I saw another thing on Facebook that said it was different from anybody else. It was in Shawnee, Kansas. It seemed to be amniotic fluid that wasn’t frozen. And, still, that just kind of gave me an upset stomach again, thinking, “Why would I put something in me from somebody else when I don’t know what kind of diseases or anything they had?”

I have a friend, a really, long-, long- longtime friend, and I talked to him. He said, “Well, Vickie, I have this place that I went to and I think it’s great. They take the stem cells out of your fat.” We started talking about it, and talking about it some more, and then I came to Kansas Regenerative Medicine Center. They were so great. I had a whole list of questions to talk to them about. I wrote them all down and had them on my computer. I was talking to the doctor, and he answered all the questions the way that I wanted to hear them.

It’s a big step, but I decided that I was going to pull the trigger. Of course, that was right at Christmastime when I thought: “Do you have that kind of money?” No, but you do it anyway. “If you’re going to invest, you might as well invest in yourself, don’t you think?”

It took me one day, literally one day, and I was back on my feet again. I didn’t have to be off work, I didn’t have to do anything. It just went very well and I got better and got better. Just within a week’s period I just knew, “Oh my gosh, this is so much better!” I can tell you I don’t have that fear of going up and down stairs anymore. “I was crippled before, and I’m not now, and I won’t be getting my knees replaced for quite some time.”