Dr. Todd Swanson holds a model of a hip joint Wednesday in discussing the hip replacement surgery he performed on Gov. Kenny Guinn. Photo by John Gurzinski.

CARSON CITY -- Gov. Kenny Guinn said Wednesday that he was about to take his third walk of the day on his new artificial right hip, inserted during a one-hour surgery in a Southern Nevada hospital the previous day.

"I'm doing great," Guinn said in a telephone interview. "I was walking around at 6 a.m., again at 10:30 a.m., and I will be up again in a few minutes.

"I have had no pain in this process," he said. "This is phenomenal."

The procedure, performed by Dr. Todd Swanson at the Spring Valley Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas, used a less invasive technique that allows patients to recover more quickly.

Guinn said he should be out of the hospital by today or Friday and walking on his own by next week. He has been using a cane for balance and made some use of a walker, his wife, Dema Guinn, said at the hospital.

"I can put my full weight on my right leg," he said. "It doesn't bother me at all."

However, Guinn did say he had to push a button on the morphine drip to help with some pain early Wednesday but hadn't used it since about 6 a.m.

"There's a button you can push, but you can't overpush it," he said.

There is also a local anesthetic that goes right to the site of the surgery and the 3 1/2-inch incision, he said.

The procedure, known most commonly as mini-hip replacment or mini-incision surgery, requires an incision of about 3 to 4 inches, one-third the size of incisions in traditional hip replacement.

Smaller incisions typically cause less body trauma, pain and blood loss, and they usually help shorten recovery time.

Swanson, who has performed nearly 400 of these procedures at the hospital, said the governor should be back to normal physical activities within four weeks as opposed to a few months.

Guinn was back on the job Wednesday in his hospital room, going over files on potential appointees to various posts, including a Washoe District judicial vacancy.

Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt served as acting governor while Guinn was undergoing and recovering from surgery.

Guinn had family visits and a card from the grandchildren that said: "Hip, hooray for grandpa."

"This is a very slick and efficient procedure,'' said Swanson, who began utilizing the technique in 1997 after studying what other physicians were doing as far as making smaller incisions with hip replacement.

"We were the first to start standardizing the technique,'' he said at his office Wednesday at Desert Orthopaedic Center on Desert Inn Road. "I just kept shrinking the incision down. It was a baby-steps approach. I didn't think it would ever come to anything.''

Swanson quickly saw positive results. His patients didn't have as much pain after surgery. Within a few years, he said, the procedure drew interest from other orthopedic surgeons.

He was asked to speak about it at conventions and wrote papers on the technique as well. As of late, he and his surgical team are teaching other physicians from across the country the technique at Spring Valley.

In upcoming months, he'll take that knowledge overseas with stops in Austria, Switzerland, China and Spain.

"Eventually, this will be the standard for hip replacement surgery,'' he said. "But whenever you have change, there is always some criticism. Much of that has come from older physicians who don't like change.''

Swanson said he and others at the hospital are working on designing surgical instruments exclusive to the mini-hip replacement procedure. Currently, surgeons are using instruments also used in traditional hip replacement.

Karla Perez, chief executive officer at Spring Valley, said it's these kinds of medical innovations being offered in Nevada that residents need to know about. She said this should send a message that Nevadans need not head out of state for medical attention.

Dema Guinn agreed.

"I have my husband back, the one who wasn't in a lot of pain,'' she said. "And we decided not to leave Southern Nevada for the surgery.''

Guinn said he probably will have his other hip socket replaced later this year or early in 2007.