My Double ACL Surgery: Happy Birthday to My Left

1/12/06: I went snowboarding at a tiny molehill in Massanutten, VA (for you locals, go West and you'll see why I'm calling it a molehill). The dangers of boredom: I thought I could jump off a big kicker, across an icy tabletop and down the slope just fine (designed by Deaf Olympian Jeremy Cline). I was inches too short. Yes, I landed smack on the edge of the icy tabletop and destroyed my left knee which landed first. Wincing in pain, Jeremy came up to me, and with incredible doctor-like foresight and said, "Tore your ACL?"



At that time, I laughed it off and said, "No way. I'm fine". Gosh. I walked away, got on the next lift, and tried to snowboard down. I couldn't. My knee felt as if it was going to slide off my lower leg. It was completely loose. I gave up and sat down on my snowboard just like a sled and went zipping down the mountain, using my feet as brakes. I refused to believe anything was wrong with me and actually went to play a soccer game the next evening, but my coaches benched me after a few minutes. Went to see a doctor, he said my knee was fine, and that I just needed physical therapy. A week later, I still couldn't play soccer. But get this - I was walking around just fine, I could even run in a straight line just fine. What I couldn't do was any form of lateral movement. If I shifted left or right, oh my, ***stars in me eyes***.



Fed up, I complained to my therapist who told me to see the doctor again. To the doctor, I signed *cut throat* and pointed to my knee. He gave in, and x-rayed my knee. X-ray?! They only see bones, not ligaments or cartilage. But the doctor explained - sometimes with a serious impact, not only the ligament will be torn, but there'll be fractures to the leg bones as well. A x-ray is much cheaper than a MRI, and it's preferable to go for a x-ray first. And the x-ray showed I had a fracture to the tibia! He sent me off to get a MRI immediately. Sure enough, when I returned to the office for my MRI results, my doctor stretched a rubberband vertically in front of me. He took out a scisscors and cut it off about a foot away from my face. You can imagine the reaction I had. Completely GONE?! My ACL?!



(Photos of the insides of my knee, courtesy of MRI :))

Fast forward nearly a year, to 12/1/06. While playing intramurual flag football at Gallaudet, I popped my right knee. Intense pain! I wanted to die! I knew at that moment I tore the ACL in my other knee. God! After talking to my doctor, surgeon and therapist, all agreed that I must have tore my left completely, but had a partial tear to my right on that fateful jump at Massanutten... after a year of hanging on, it was finally retired on that day. Advice: If you want to do big air, find a way not to land. :)



There are different ways to do an ACL surgery. What I had was an arthroscopic allograft reconstruction. The surgery was done without cutting open my entire knee. An allograft means I have a screwed in achilles tendon (the muscle in the back of ankle) from a dead body (cadaver) in both my knees. My surgeon says it costs about $1,000 for the achilles tendon. The operation cost my insurance about $15,000. So far, my left is exactly one year old as of today, and my right is 9 weeks old. One nice thing about all this: I can say now my knees match :)


P.S. Patients are required to write on their knee "YES" because there have been many lawsuits - where the wrong knee was operated on. Whoops. And on my kneecap, you can see the initials of my surgeon: Dr. Steven Bernstein. All this has to happen before I'm knocked out - to make completely sure it's the right knee. Gee! Also, if you look at the first picture with both knees, you can barely see the ACL scars on the right... nice, eh?