I’ve had trouble with the area around my left knee for a few years, but for the most part it had been tolerable. But then, back in late January I was out running one freezing cold morning and my knee just blew up. I heard something snap as a shockwave of pain went through my knee. Since then, my running has been a mess. For a few weeks afterwards I was able to run okay, but with a lot of popping and cracking and irritation. Then I started compensating on the other leg and was out until the late spring because of my right IT band. Despite not running much for several months, the irritation in the left knee never went away. I felt it driving, climbing stairs, and sometimes walking around. I knew something bad had happened and it was only a matter of time before I had to do something about it. Since the IT band got better, I’ve been running more. That is, until two weeks ago when I began to feel really bad grinding pain in the joint. It was time to face the pain and deal with it.
After two visits to the orthopedist and an MRI, the doctor says I have torn a hole in my articular cartilage that surrounds the joint. The piece that tore out is now floating around above the knee joint, which explains the weird spasms and soreness I have at the end of the lower quad. The good thing (according to the doctor) is that the hole is kind of on the side of the joint, meaning that it doesn’t bear much weight. If the hole were on the bottom, I wouldn’t be able to walk. The doctor had me do a couple different movements with my leg and was surprised that they didn’t cause me much pain. It seemed that the MRI indicated that I was much worse off than I felt. Going in there after the MRI, I was surprised to get such a definitive answer as to what was going on. It seems that most of my past injuries were always ambiguous, but of course they were never this bad.
So now I am scheduled for surgery at the end of August to remove the loose piece of cartilage and to stimulate growth of new cartilage via a process known as “microfracture”. They poke holes in the bone where the hole is and cause bleeding and a clot to form. Over time, the area is supposed to form new cartilage. It won’t be as good as the original cartilage, but it will be better than nothing and hopefully stop the metal-on-metal grinding that I’ve had when I last ran.
So now I have to face the prospect of not being able to run again for a very long time. Post-surgery I am supposed to be on crutches for a minimum of four weeks, but I have heard it can take longer before you can walk again. The healing process takes months so it may be that long before I can try running, but the doctor seems to think that I will be able to run again with no problem. This is good, but it really sucks that I won’t be able to do much for a long while. A couple other guys on the team have had similar problems and have had long, frustrating recoveries. I have to remember that the damage has already been done and that I will have to get the surgery or else the piece floating around in the knee could cause further complications.
Things will get worse before they get better, but it sounds like many people are able to pick up where they left off running-wise after having the same surgery. If I don’t get this done and deal with it, then I’ll never have a chance of getting back to where I was.
I find this funny, because a year ago I remarked to Keith when we were in Sacramento that I had probably done some permanent damage to myself after running in college for five years. At that point an area below the knee had been bothering me for over a year and was getting increasingly sore. The soreness below the knee seemed to come and go with time, sometimes going away for months at a time. Over last summer and into the fall it seemed to go away almost completely, but then it came back in the winter and seemed to be the basis for the blowup in January. The doctor wondered what I had done to cause such a problem but neither he nor I could seem to come up with an explanation as to why things progressed from the soreness to the sudden explosion.
For the past few weeks I’ve been biking, but sometimes I can feel something in the knee when I just start out or really jam on the pedals. It hasn’t been too bad and it’s just as well because it’s been so hot. Biking in Williamsburg is pretty enjoyable since it’s only about 10 minutes to rural farm roads. I did go home this past weekend and fought the tourists biking on Atlantic Ave.
All the stuff for my M.S. degree has been turned in and I should get my diploma at the end of August. I don’t think there is a ceremony or anything but I think I’m allowed to go to the spring graduation in 2009. My sister and I can “graduate” at the same time. I’ll still be here another two, three or more years, though. I’m glad I decided to do the Ph.D., considering the alternative of working in a cube farm as usual and doing something boring and mundane that some boss wants me to do. The work here has been challenging and has kept my interest. The work from my M.S. project is being refined into a conference paper that we will try to get out within a month. I’ve read some strong arguments as to why to not get a Ph.D., but at this point I figure I have nothing to lose as long as I am fully funded and am making progress towards completion. Most of the arguments are about the increasing difficulty of getting a tenured faculty position, but most likely I will go into industry. Those at the places I’ve worked that had Ph.D.s had a lot of control over what they worked on and also seemed indispensable to their organization. They had a lot more creative license than the regular code monkeys. I just can’t see myself being a regular run of the mill programmer for the rest of my life, always doing what someone else tells me to. Anyhow, if it hits the fan while I’m here, I can get out with my M.S. and still get a regular job.
A lot has been on my mind the past few months, but recently it’s been dominated by this mess with my knee. The coming months are going to be a bigger test of willpower and attitude than during any period during my high school or college running career.
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