00:00 Keen mountaineer Annette Skirker embraces the difficulties that come with scaling heights
00:07 around the world.
00:09 But her adventures were put on ice when she sustained a seemingly minor elbow injury during
00:14 an expedition in Greenland in 2016.
00:17 When I got home it was really quite severe.
00:21 I had trouble chopping vegetables, I couldn't hold a toothbrush in that hand to brush my
00:28 teeth.
00:29 She had a nose with tennis elbow and waited two years in vain for it to heal.
00:34 After considering surgery which only had a 50% success rate, Miss Skirker opted instead
00:40 to join a world first trial and couldn't believe the results.
00:45 Anything at all is possible again and it has surprised me.
00:51 The procedure takes the healthy knee tendon cells from the patient and grows them in a
00:56 lab in Perth.
00:58 And once we have enough volume we're then able to have an ultrasound guided injection
01:04 where we're actually injecting the patient's own cells back into the tendon body and it's
01:09 those cells that then start to reform new tendon.
01:13 As much as 3% of Australia's adult population suffers from tennis elbow, ranging from slight
01:19 discomfort to serious life altering pain.
01:23 But the newly released results of the trial are encouraging to surgeons.
01:28 They're at their wits end and they come to me requesting surgery and the ability to give
01:32 them an alternative has been a real breakthrough I think in this problem.
01:38 Even today I still am surprised by how everything is so back to normal that I can still do everything
01:47 and then some.
01:48 A welcome relief.
01:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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