Tony, maybe you should look carefully at the statistics on wound infections, which are far more prevalent today than they were when you had your knee replacements, especially in the orthopedic field. A simple stitch infection can lead to a real problem. Hospitals have experienced a growing problem with hospital staph, which caused one of the PSR Tutorial members to nearly lose his life just two years ago. There are several new strains of this disease out there that do not respond to conventional antibiotic therapy and can be deadly, even in the best hospitals. Tony, you were fortunate and had a good experience, but there are lots of folks that have not had that same experience you enjoyed.
Now, I think I know a bit more about medicine that 99 percent of the folks on this forum, you included. I spent 15 years of my younger life working with the top surgeons in Baltimore's most prestigious teaching hospitals, University of Maryland and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. I trained at the National Institute of Health under Dr. Michael Debakey, Dr. Joe McLaughlin and other top thoracic surgeons in the nation. And, I continue to keep up with many of the advancements in surgical technique and cardio-pulmonary medicine, which I specialized in and taught at Spokane Community College. I saw and worked on more surgical patients in a day than I care to remember, and even with some of the best sterile technique, back before hospital staph infections were prevalent, wound infections were not at all uncommon.
My wife needs a knee replacement, but the surgeons will not do it because she developed a skin rash that the dermatologists have not been able to cure for more than 8 years. The knee pain she experiences daily is horrible, but the surgeons refuse to perform the knee replacement surgery because the odds of developing a serious infection in the replacement are extremely high.
So, Tony, you may have some friends that have not had a problem, the same as you have not, but in this instance, you really don't know what the Hell you are talking about. While the infection rate varies from as low as 1-percent to as high as 5-percent, keep in mind that there will be 1.4 million knee replacement surgeries performed during this year alone. And, those infections can show up at any time, during the hospital stay, during post operative therapy and recovery, and sometimes several months to a year after the procedure, depending on the disease entity. Now, I only had to scrub on a couple dozen knee and hip replacements, but I didn't have to do the followups on these patients. I only had to scrub on these cases because there was a cardiac risk of the patient undergoing up to 3 hours of deep, general anesthesia. I was there to place the patient on a pump-oxygenator if they happened to go into heart failure during the procedure. Consequently, I was acting as a surgical assistant unless a problem developed.
Tony, revision surgery of a knee takes about twice as long as the original procedure, sometimes longer. The recovery time is about twice as long as well. And, the longer the wound is open, the greater the risk of wound infection. There are lots of studies that can be found in the New England Journal Of Medicine that clearly show how the risk of infection increases with the length of time the wound is open.
One last point, Tony. Most of the doctors I worked with were professors in teaching hospitals and considered by their peers as among the best in the nation, and in many instances, the best in the world. As for the hospitals, it would difficult to find more prestigious institutions than The National Institute of Health, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and University of Maryland Hospital. University of Maryland Hospital is where the first Shock Trauma Unit was founded by my boss, Dr R. Adams Cowley. Johns Hopkins Hospital is where Dr Ben Carson, world famous pediatric neurosurgeon was director of the Department of Neurosurgery and successfully performed some of the most complex surgical procedures ever attempted. Many of the top surgeons in the nation did post doctoral fellowships at NIH when I trained there.
Gary
But standing up and moving around gets the circulation going again. Plus I sing much better (need all the help I can get). 
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