Yesterday around 8:30 I went in for my ACL reconstruction surgery. It’s been awhile since I updated this, so I suppose I should get everyone up to speed on what’s been happening.
I am (well rather, was) employed at Prairie Green golf course at the pro shop there. Great job, nobody’s going to get rich doing it, but the guys there are cool and I get all the free golf I can handle, or I could have had this not happened.
So the last time I saw the doc in Cranbrook he told me to go see someone in a month when I got back to Sioux Falls, after the road trip and such. Fast forward one month and I went to go see Doctor Smith at Orthopedic Institute. After one look at me and some moving around of the knee and such, he said that he thought my ACL was gone and that I need to have an MRI and probably surgery asap. The MRI confirmed that I haven’t had an ACL since my accident. The doctor in Cranbrook completely missed it and I was more than a little upset to find that out. I also had a fairly large meniscus tear, and a chunk of it floating around in my knee.
The next day I saw Dr. Zollner, an orthopedic surgeon, to see what my options were. He told me surgery was necessary and should happen as soon as possible as well. Originally we weren’t planning on doing the surgery until the end of June since we always go on a family vacation the third week in June and it would only be putting it back a couple of weeks to wait until then. That way I wouldn’t be hobbling around while on vacation. However, a few days after that, we got a call from the doc saying that he couldn’t do surgery that day and that we’d have to push it back a week or so. Now, we were getting close to a month from when I could do surgery to when I was actually doing it, and so I decided to go ahead and get it done with so I can be well recovered by the time ski season rolls around.
Surgery yesterday took about an Hour and 45 minutes and unfortunately had some unseen problems. Nothing major, I mean, I didn’t flat line or anything like that, but it just didn’t go like we thought it would. I should say that I haven’t talked to the doc yet, so all of this information I got from nurses and staff.
Originally Dr. Zollner was going to use a hamstring tendon as my ACL, but when he got in there, he found that it was damaged pretty badly in the accident and he was unable to use it. So, he ended up using my Patellar tendon, which is also a very common ACL reconstruction method. While he was in there as well, he got the chunk of meniscus floating around out, and repaired what he could. Unfortunately he had to cut some more out and so now I have arthritis to look forward to in 20 years or so. Plenty of time for the medical community to come up with a great meniscus substitute! He also notice that my PCL was damaged and so he repaired that as best as he could. PCL’s though are the most solid of all the tendons, and one of the trainers told me that there are lots of NFL players playing with partially torn PCL’s. I’m cool with that.
So all in all I tore my ACL, MCL, PCL and got a good hunk of meniscus out of there. The good news is that there’s no reason why I can’t be skiing next season, so Fernie here I come!
As for now, I’m hooked up to a machine that keeps my leg moving all the time and I’m supposed to be in that for 16 to 18 hours a day. I have plenty of exercises to keep things moving and I’m confident that I’ll be back on my feet before too long. 5 to 7 days on my pimped out crutches again, but I can deal with that.
The Kasstle won’t exactly be the best I’ve ever had, but it’s kind of like any good thing. A bad day at the Kasstle is still better than a good day stuck at home! It won’t be too bad though, I won’t be skiing or anything like that, but I wouldn’t have been anyways.
All in all I fell pretty good considering I had surgery yesterday morning. I’ve got some happy pills to get me by the next few days and a nerve block in my leg that unfortunately has to come out tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone for all the well-wishes… here’s hoping to be back on my feet before long!
