I've had this date virtually circled on my virtual calendar for 15 days now, but it's been almost 20 years in the making. I have a left knee that "locks" on occasion, particularly in cold weather, plus it's now started to hurt whenever I have to make lateral movement. I first hurt it in a soccer/football match when I was 15, back in early 1990, on a slide tackle and it was judged then to be a severely sprained ligament, but no MRIs were done (this is back before most of the innovations in it then and the cost perhaps was too much for my dad to care to pay). Started to get worse in college, as I first had to give up playing rec volleyball (on asphalt, mostly) then rec basketball (well, that was after I broke my right radial head in a fall my junior year), and then it's progressed.
Back in September, though, I aggravated it when I stepped wrong on a step in my then-classroom and the knee buckled a bit. I thought I heard a slight pop, but since my knee now pops a few times a week, I thought it'd just be momentary pain. But although the levels of pain have varied, it has been a near constant since then, so I gave in and in about 45 minutes, I'm leaving for a consultation with an orthopedic surgeon. I'll probably have to have another MRI scheduled in the next couple of weeks and then based on those results, I likely will have either arthroscopic or open knee surgery, depending on whether or not I have ligament tears in addition to the meniscus tear that I certainly have.
Either way, it'll be a relief to get something done on this knee, as limping like a crippled elderly man at the age of 34 isn't all that appealing to me right now...
The Empirical Approach to Learning
1 day ago
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3 comments:
my dad had a knee surgery on an old injury from his early twenties when he was 40-ish. the one piece of advice he always gives everyone who's having any kind of surgical procedure is to Do The Physical Therapy. Blowing off the PT between official sessions is apparently one of the biggest reasons surgeries "fail" (in the sense of not restoring everything they were supposed to restore).
good luck!
Take care, man. I´m going to 4.3 and I´m already starting to feel my right knee failing me sometimes. With 34, you have a lot of road (literally) to go yet.
Yeah, I know, but my injuries go back to 15 (left knee) and 28 (right knee), both of them being meniscus tears combining with genetically malformed patellas that rub the cartilage apart over time. Playing both kinds of football for years didn't help matters much, but right now, I just want something done to clean up the mess-to-date.
And Elena,
PT is something I never blow off. In fact, the (probable) surgery will be a good excuse to make more time for exercise, since I've tailed off a lot in the past couple of years because the pain kept building up.
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