Sunday, March 23, 2014

Knee Repairs

In early July of last summer, I was moving some furniture at my mother-in-law's house as we emptied the house for her estate sale. I was moving backwards through the living room when my foot got hung in the carpet and my knee bent backwards in an unnatural and perverse way. I managed to stay on my feet, but I was in some pain. The knee continued to bother me on and off throughout the whole summer and when August came I had a child at school back his chair up into my injured knee, bending it backwards again.  I lived with it until I tweaked while performing as a "Leaping Lord" in a school sing-along of "The Twelve Days of Christmas".

I decided to have it checked out at the local orthopedic doctor's office. The PA thought that I tore my meniscus and maybe had a few other minor issues. The doctor, himself, thought it was more minor than that, but he thought it would be good to go ahead and do exploratory surgery and do a simple fix.

It turned out that the knee was damaged way back behind the kneecap. There was no cartilage there. The doctor performed a micro-fracture procedure. In that procedure, he had to drill tiny holes that hopefully would bleed into the empty cartilage area and then eventually scar tissue would form there to replace to cartilage.  Then the doctor had to sew up the meniscus and reattach it to bone.

What was supposed to be a 30 minute procedure turned into  a two hour surgery.

I've attached a few photos if you dare to look.