ACL

Last May I was playing soccer at a local indoor arena. During the course of a game, I planted my right foot and turned to my left. I heard a sharp pop, my knee buckled, and I collapsed. The pain was unbearable. After several attempts to get up, I was carried off the field and given an ice pack. I tried to go back on the field, but I couldn’t seem to put any weight on the knee. So I limped out to the parking lot and drove home.

That night, my knee was feeling better so I started to hobble around the house. I seemed to be improving and the ice (and beer) was certainly helping. Late that night, I stood up out of a chair and the pain exploded from me knee. I saw stars. I was nauseated by the pain. I gasped for breath. Then I noticed I was lying on the ground. My wife says I screamed. It was then I decided to visit the doctor.

A few xrays showed that there was nothing wrong, but my doctor suspected ligament damage in the knee, so he sent me to an orthopedic specialist. As I waited in the examining room, I saw from the pictures on the walls that the specialist is a soccer player and plays at the arena where I hurt my knee.

After asking me what happened, the doctor grabbed my knee, twisted it into some contortions, pushed, probed, and looked for expressions of pain on my face. He saw many, I’m sure. After the exam the verdict was a torn ACL.

The ACL is a ligament inside your knee that holds the two halves of your leg together. Without it, your leg moves like a broken hinge. It bends in strange ways. There’s nothing to keep it from bending slightly sideways or from shearing front to back. Your knee pops and shifts and dislocates as you walk. And each of those abnormal movements hurt—a lot.

At first I was placed in a full leg brace that immobilized the knee. The contraption reached from my ankle to mid-thigh. After a couple of weeks the swelling went down and I was able to take the brace off. Now I can walk without the brace, but if I’m going to be doing any real activity I need to wear a smaller brace that just covers the knee. It has hinges and straps and hydraulics. Okay, so it doesn’t have hydraulics, but that would be cool, wouldn’t it?

The ACL is stretched tight, like a rubber band. When it tears, the two halves separate completely and can not be reattached. To repair the damage, they replace the ligament, either with a donor ligament from a cadaver or with a portion of one of your other ligaments.

The surgery is in a few weeks and I’m getting a bit nervous. I’ve never done anything like this before. I still have my tonsils, my wisdom teeth, and I have no cavities or fillings. I have no point of reference at all for what goes on in a surgical environment. An anesthesiologist friend of mine says that the surgery will last 3-5 hours. That seems like a long time to be under.