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2005-12-19 6:17 p.m.

Knee surgery today. I know I didn�t write much (if anything) on this upcoming surgery, but it was today.

Not feeling to well. My knee is very sore (obviously) and I have a wicked bad sore throat. The operation was interesting yet painful. They relaxed me, but I was awake and could feel them working and watch on a monitor (very cool). The freezing started to wear off, and I�m thinking that, since that�s happened before to me, I may have some sort of tolerance for it and get used to it quickly. But, they refroze the area. It still hurt, but I could relax the muscles so they could work.

There were more problems than anticipated. The Dr. thought I just had a loose body floating around in there or possibly a meniscus tear. He was leaning towards the first because of the amount of activity I could do on my knee. But, when he started to look around, he said to me: �How did you do anything on this knee? Did you really run a marathon?�

Problem number one: My Anterior Cruciate Ligament (seen here http://www.orthone.com/sport/acl.asp) was torn at some point - probably during the original injury when I was 16. The Dr. thinks it was misdiagnosed as just cartilage problem and therefore it didn�t heal right. In fact, most of it is gone, and what�s left has reattached itself to the wrong part of my knee. He didn�t repair this yet, we need to sit down and talk about that repair as it�s a bigger problem.

Then, the doctor had to completely remove my meniscus as it was beyond repair.

Then there was some damage to my lateral ligament that he fixed up.

And then the fun part. My femur was bashing against my knee cap due to some falls I�ve had (landing on the knee), and my meniscus being so deteriorated and my needing to kneel and put all my weight on it to fix it when it locks. The bashing caused several gashes in the knee cap bone and he had to smooth out those gashes with a horrible scrapy thingy. That was a horrible and weird sensation.

After the operation, which went very well all things considered, my knee started to hurt right away (because the freezing wore off so quickly), so they gave me a Percocet (which the nice nurse explained to me is the same as taking three Tylenol 3s, and yes, there was a mean nurse too). After 40 minutes and no pain relief, they game me another. It was more tolerable then, but I also got the side effects of being really itchy (still have that one) and the muscle twitches. Funny, but annoying.

The Dr said that my knee locking will now stop because it was the meniscus causing that and it�s gone, and it will feel much better than before. He said that I can run only once a week and only three miles, and the rest of my activity must be non-impact. But, he understood that I really love running, so that one time a week won�t be bad. But, of course, I need to wait a few months while this heals.



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