Thursday, September 28, 2006

Knee Scope Surgery

I may be the worst blogger ever. Three months between posts. Nice, Scott.

So two weeks post-surgery to have my meniscus tear in my right knee fixed. Things are progressing well. I'm walking, albeit slowly. Physical therapy three times a week is kicking my ass but it's definitely speeding up the recovery time. And who wouldn't want a little faster recovery time, right?

Basically what they did was go in through two holes just below the kneecap. One hole is for the camera, the other for the surgical tools. Kinda cool what they found in there.

The meniscus is the cartilage in the knee that separates the two bones at the joint. Kind of functions as a gasket of sorts. They don't normally do repairs on people my age because it's a very slow healing process and most of the time doesn't work real well. So they pretty much just slice off the damaged part and leave ya with whatever healthy area remains. Here's a pic of my meniscus showing the tear.



See the stuff that looks like stringy crab meat? Crappy meniscus.

Since they were in there anyway...they decided to cruise around and see what they could find. Wouldn't ya know? The source of all my knee pain was a half-smoked doobie that someone left in my knee. Those darn rastas!



So they took that out too. I think I saw a couple of scrub nurses blazing it up....but then again, I was on some pretty serious pain meds.

Here's the knee all cleaned up.


Notice the shaggy stuff is gone. We'll refer to that as the "never gonna run again" stuff. Anybody else think this looks a little too much like something else?

Surprisingly, I've had very little pain. Only used two of the 30 Vicodin they gave me. I gave the rest of them to Terrell Owens. In hindsight, an error in judgment.

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