She’s an active retiree who loves to travel, spend time with family, go RV camping and spend a month each year at Mariners spring training in Arizona. But when Stephanie Brown’s left knee kept going out and pain threatened to disrupt her step and her lifestyle, she knew she had to do something.
Brown, a Yakima resident, turned to Dr. Gary Bos of KVH Orthopedics in Ellensburg.
Bos may not have an organized fan club like the Mariners do, but if he did the 69-year-old Brown just might be at the helm. In 2015, Bos replaced her left knee. Duly impressed, two years later she had him do the other one.
That Brown turned to Bos was hardly accidental. After all, when her husband Ron needed knee replacement surgery in 2012, their oldest daughter – then a surgical tech in Yakima – insisted he have Bos do it. “She knew Dr. Bos. She’d watched him do surgery and she knew his reputation,” Brown says.
The rest is history.
With Ron readily sharing his experience, word spread. Ron’s best friend soon followed suit and had a knee replacement. Then came the best friend’s wife, who also happens to be Stephanie Brown’s best friend. Stephanie’s first surgery followed a week or so later.
“Another friend who’d had surgery done by someone else came up to see Dr. Bos and had some repairs done,” Brown says. “I have another girl friend who had her knee done six or eight weeks ago.”
But Brown is nothing but serious when she talks about Bos and her experience at KVH. Besides his professionalism, Bos was warm, personable and a good communicator who not only listened to her concerns – but heard them. “One of the nice things was that he did a local anesthesia so I didn’t have to recover from general anesthesia,” she says. “That was one of my big fears.”
And it isn’t just Bos who makes the KVH experience memorable, she says. It’s the atmosphere of warmth and caring she says permeates the KVH environment. “I don’t know who is responsible,” she says. “My husband raved about it when he had his surgery done. You see it everywhere in the hospital. The girls at the front desk are very friendly and helpful as are all the other people you meet in pre-op, radiology, everywhere. I absolutely cannot complain about anyone. Everyone takes great care of you.”
They also go above and beyond when they see a need, she says. Case in point: When her best friend’s husband began to feel badly while waiting for his wife during a pre-op appointment in Bos’s office. “He was not feeling good, not looking good,” Brown says. “One of Dr. Bos’s receptionists saw that and said, ‘I’m taking him over to the hospital’ and put him in a wheelchair and took him over to the Emergency Department,” Brown says. “They immediately got him in. Because it was a heart problem he was transferred to a hospital in Yakima.”
On the day the man’s wife had her knee surgery, he stopped by Bos’s office to personally deliver a bouquet of flowers and an appreciative “thank you” to the staff member who helped him. “He says she saved his life,” Brown says.
“If I could come here for everything I needed to go to a hospital for I would be here in a flash,” she adds with a smile. “ It’s that good.”