Staying in Top Form
Profile of Jim Nichols
A businessman and triathlete keeps up the pace after knee replacement.
You’ve practically got to run to keep up with Jim Nichols — and that’s just the way he likes it.
“You do what you can with the time that you’ve got,” he says in his soft Georgia accent. “I don’t have time for letting the grass grow under my feet.”
Last summer, Jim, 69, completed three months of rehabilitation for twin knee replacement surgery. “I’m almost back to where I want to be,” he says. Where he wants to be is fully involved in a life so rich and diverse it would exhaust people half his age.
He owns companies in Wareham and Norton and runs a plant in China where he travels at least twice a year. He was, and still is, a top-notch athlete. Until his surgery, he competed in six or seven triathlons a year. Back in the day, he starred on the Vanderbilt and Valdosta State University college basketball teams.
That’s just for starters. He and his wife Sonny operate a farm on a beautiful, nine-acre parcel of land in Yarmouth Port. “The key to farming is managing the manure,” he laughs. The farm is stocked with “rescue” animals. He and Sonny are active in Special Olympics and in helping young people recover from addiction.
When Jim grudgingly admitted he had to do something about his deteriorating knees, his biggest fear was how long he would be out of commission. “I have this clock in my head that’s always ticking. My knees had been bad for a long time. The doctor said they were the worst knees he’d ever seen,” Jim says.
Once uncommon, double joint replacement surgery is growing in popularity. “Overall, Jim shortened his recovery period by rehabilitating both knees at once,” says Susan Ehrenthal, M.D., Jim’s RHCI physician and a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation.
As Jim considered his options, it became clear that rehabilitation was crucial to a successful recovery. “I read everything I could. I talked to people at RHCI and watched how they worked. That was huge. Because once my doctor cut into my knees, I knew there was no turning back.”
“At RHCI, we can give patients like Jim the amount of therapy they’re looking for,” says Dr. Ehrenthal. “As I like to tell my patients, the results of a joint replacement are only as good as the rehab which follows. Jim wanted to be active as soon as possible, and three hours a day of therapy was a perfect fit to realize the best outcome from his surgery.
Days after successful surgery at Cape Cod Hospital, Jim arrived at RHCI. His therapists were impressed with his work ethic.
“He was so motivated,” says Mary Seaver, Jim‘s occupational therapist. “If you asked him to do ten repetitions of an exercise, he’d do 15. He made it all fun. He’d come into a room with his smiling face and brighten up everyone."
“I was called the mayor of RHCI because I didn’t want to stay in bed,” Jim admits. “I’d get up and walk the halls and see everybody. I made a lot of friends.”
Jim “graduated” to outpatient rehabilitation at RHCI’s Yarmouth center. For the next three months, physical therapist Diane O’Connell witnessed the same drive his inpatient team had seen. “Jim understood that his home exercise program was just as important as the treatment he got in outpatient therapy,” she notes.
“I wanted to get better as fast as I could,” Jim says. “There’s still so much I want to do.”
In the center of Jim’s home office, the bicycle he rides in triathlons is mounted on a training stand that allows him to pedal indoors. “When I first got back, I couldn’t make the pedals go around once,” he says. Now, Jim is focused on April, when he will compete in his first triathlon since the surgery.
“I would recommend RHCI to anyone,” Jim says. “I was always impressed. I’d wake up in the morning, and they had my therapy schedule for the day right there. If you want to get well and will do what it takes, there’s not a better place that I know of.”
