I'm having ACL & Meniscus surgery again (on the other knee). This will balance the knee universe in which I reside and have both my knees matching.
A little over 6 1/2 years ago I had ACL & Meniscus surgery. All told my timeline went something like this:
A large, stocky white belt basically sat directly into the side of my knee/collapsed his entire body weight into it and sat and it felt like the hands of God reached down and began to tear my leg apart like it was a Thanksgiving turkey leg. I literally blacked out from the pain. Whenever I came out of that blackout, I was on the mat however many moments later in excruciating pain as I suspect my knee was separated as well. and had to fit back into place once the muscles stopped panicking.
For my previous knee injury described above, I had the Patellar tendon bone graft (my own as there have been instances of rejection of a cadaver graft and possible cases where the graft was weakened by the sterilization and storage fluids) and the Patellar Tendon graft as it is still seen as the best long-term, return to stability/strength, and high end sports performance option. I have had zero problems with this knee since. I read literally every publication I could find, every review online, every blog post, literally EVERYTHING I could find on the topic before arriving at this decision. I wanted the long term, best viable result and strongest knee possible. More PT and time on the front end to hopefully increase the likelihood of a long-term knee for competition.
A couple days after surgery, I got on my crutches, went down to the gym in my apartment building and did some curls with dumbbells. True story. At about 3 months I was doing some semi-live-ish training with a few, very, very select training partners (as seen above). At 6 months the same. I competed in Judo again at 10 months. I took my PT seriously, and though I was back competing at 10 months, I went into matches with certain positions and areas where I would concede position and lose rather than force and risk injury. I don't know that I will follow exactly that return to action time table.
There's the moment, in the small, sterile, white, bright room....the surgeon (I found a sport-specific Orthopaedic surgeon) looks at you and asks what your goals are for your life both short-term, sport-specific, and long-term athletic endeavors if any.
It was a short conversation as I told him I wanted the graft with the lowest fail rate and the best long term prognosis for returning to high end sports performance. He was on board as well, so it's another Patellar tendon bone graft.
I had forgotten I had these short clips of me moving around live from way back when. So, here they are, for those of you who stumble across this page and end up having ACL/Meniscus surgery. There's hope.
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