An Evening at Zimmer Biomet (Ireland) ✨

We were invited to visit Zimmer Biomet on the 25^th of July, 2023, and I was overjoyed. A year ago, I had undergone a bilateral total knee replacement surgery, and my new knees were a product of Zimmer Biomet, Oranmore, County Galway, and Shannon, County Clare.

Wow, when I first knew about it, I was dumbstruck as the cute parents of my adorable granddaughter lived there and worked in Zimmer, too. Was it sheer coincidence or a stroke of luck? I wouldn’t know, but I knew that my heart was there, and I would soon be going there.

So, a year later, when I travelled to Ireland from India on the 9^th of June, I realised that the long travel, with its painful airport walks, were all past horrors. I was flying painless and free and loving each moment. Even as I landed after a long travel from Mumbai to London, with a seven-hour layover, before I boarded the flight to Shannon, my knees seemed alive, fresh and fit as I stood on them, making the ground on which I stood firm too. 

My son-in-law and granddaughter came to Shannon to receive me, and as soon as I saw them, I was overwhelmed.

Suddenly, time stood still, and I felt immense gratitude towards Zimmer and their dedicated and committed staff. I was on sound grounds, and a need to meet them and visit their workplace seemed to dominate all other thoughts. Everything seemed so immense, for it transported me to the plane beyond time, where causes and effects cease to exist.

There is a giving and a receiving but of a different nature, a distinct natural law without expecting a result. They never asked to meet the benefactors of their committed hard work, but it just happened, and so be it. For somewhere at someplace and at some point in time, there is a divine intervention, causing things to happen for others to happen.

It’s strange but true, and here, I felt the longing to establish a relationship, and it did happen on this eve of the 25^th of July, a week before I left to go back to India.

So now, as we (my husband, granddaughter and I) walked into this vast facility, it seemed to me as if a doorway opened up to a new space, which appeared to be at some remote corner of the vast world.

Suddenly, time seemed to have paused, and while the clock stopped ticking, a sweet realisation set in that these new knees resulted from years of sacrifice, hard work, focus and attention by all the hands involved in this noble mission.

And then, as I walked up the steps to the conference room, I realised that though my knees were borrowed from the makers, they were mine for keeps. After a warm welcome, where we were received by the senior management and conversations involving light-hearted humour, we were led to a fantastic walkthrough into the manufacturing unit.

Even as we began our tour, we were given specially designed spectacles for protection. The whole place was sterilised, and we washed our hands before entering the sterile facility.

The designs of the implants were shown to us. We mainly had a walk-through at the knee implant section, where we saw different machines performing different roles and how the raw materials transformed, right from cutting them up to the required sizes to the finished product, where the Femur bone and the Tibia are joined by the poly plate, the milling, the blast wash and finally the clean room where they are polished and cleaned.

It was amazing and made me realise that technology is divine intervention if used as it is meant to be. This fantastic experience restored my faith in the vastness of the universe.

Moreover, I could see positive people smiling and greeting us as if saying, “Hey, all is well in the universe, provided you are open to receiving what it offers.” Clinging to old patterns of self-denial, self-pity, or helplessness leads you to a dead end, where life reaches a finish line before it ever starts.

Over a hundred people were waiting to meet us at their conference room, where they wanted me to share my experience of knee implants with them. Oh gosh, they didn’t know then that I was equally enthusiastic, and as they all bustled into the room, I smiled at all of them, already feeling I knew them all.

Then began my newest experience of talking about my experience. Something transformed again, and this time magically, everyone seemed one, the receiver and the giver; we were one. Isn’t it true? A receiver needs a giver, and vice versa.

Oh, there’s more to this, and the exciting part is that the ones who did work on my knee implants were present, too, and we had the opportunity to meet them as well. However, the ones who didn’t work on my knee worked on someone else’s. So, the magic was on, and as I left them, I could feel that we all sailed together in the boat called life, some on one side and the others on the other, but come what may, it amalgamated.

Thank you, Zimmer, for this beautiful experience, one which I will always cherish.