Knee Surgery

Looking through my exercise logs I first started having problems with my left knee around the first of April 2008. At the time my knee got swollen and was locking up and so I went to a doctor. went easy on it for about a month until the swelling went down. I didn't have any more major problems with it until October when I started try to run more. Then it started to get really sore so I went to a doctor took a day or two off until it felt a little better. Then I tried running some more. It started to get really sore and hurting so I went to a doctor but I just kept running anyway until it was so sore I could barely walk. Then I went to a doctor took a month or so off to see if it would get better. It did not get better so I went to a doctor decided to try to some weight training to help strengthen my knees. After a few months it did start to get better, though I could not run up stairs or jump at all. Around March I started riding my bike to work again and it felt good enough that I ran a triathlon. It didn't feel too bad after that but I still couldn't jump on it or run on it without it hurting, so I mostly just road my bike.
It had been feeling pretty good and then in June while on the pioneer trek with the youth in our stake I was doing a tug of war and was pulling really hard and felt it slip a little bit and it got sore again and I was hobbling the rest of trek. At the point I finally decided I should go to a doctor because I as tired of always having to be super careful with my knee.
I went to a sports medicine doctor and he told me I probably had a torn meniscus. He referred me to a orthopedic surgeon and said I would need knee surgery. I had a choice to do an MRI but both the sports medicine doctor and the surgeon said it would be a waste of money because if they found something they would have to do surgery anyway and if they didn't find anything in the MRI they would have to do surgery to figure out what was wrong. I was convinced, so scheduled a surgery for the end of summer, after some of our planned vacations would be over.

The surgeon explained to me that if I had a torn meniscus that he would cut the torn part out and that I would be able to walk the same day and that in a month I could run, ride my bike, or do whatever I wanted. It was several weeks between when I first met with the surgeon and when I actually had the surgery. By the time the surgery was coming around my knee was actually starting to feel pretty good (though I still couldn't run or jump without pain) and I wondered if I was just being a pansy and was just wasting a lot of money. I asked the surgeon if he ever got into someone's knee and found nothing wrong. He said that rarely happened with people with my symptoms, so I decided to go ahead with the surgery.

Well it turns out that when he got into my knee, my meniscus wasn't torn. It was much worse. A large part of it was shattered and delaminated (detached from the bone). If you look at the picture at the top, the whole thing is supposed to be white. The pinkish and red parts are bone that is supposed to be covered by cartilage. So the surgeon performed what is called a micro fracture. Basically what he did was take a small awl and poke a bunch of whole into my bone where the cartilage is supposed to be. The holes are made deep enough that the bone bleeds and bone marrow seeps out. Then what is supposed to happen is that over the course of the next year or so, a scab forms which then hardens into scar tissue which has some cartilage in in it which acts as a new meniscus. Because the scab takes a while to harden, I have been on crutches for a month so as not to break it while it is soft and I am just now starting to put weight on my left knee and trying to walk on it. I am making good progress and am starting to ride a stationary bike and improve my usable range of motion. I don't know if I had gone to a doctor sooner if the surgery would have gone differently, but I do know if I had I would be done with the very unfun process of rehabilitation.