'Snowing' my knee

Waiting for a Dr. Visit

The emergency room doctor told me to wait 5-7 days for the swelling to subside and to then go see my regular doctor.  During the 5-7 days the most important part was no weight-bearing at all.  I should take Vicodin as needed and also 800mg of Advil 3x daily.  I should also apply R.I.C.E: Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation.  I did it all: iced my knee, kept the immobilizer tight when I wasn’t icing, kept the leg up, and rested.  I work at a computer so it was relatively easy for me to be sedentary.  Did I mention that my knee looked more like a grapefruit than a knee?  I quickly realized that Vicodin wasn’t for me…it slowed me down without offering relief from the discomfort.  I tried it some nights to help me sleep, but honestly, a glass of scotch was more helpful than the Vicodin.

First Dr. Visit

I waited 4 days to schedule a Dr. Appointment, which turned out to be a bad idea.  By then my doctor wasn’t going to be available until day 9 after my accident.  Thankfully I listened to my Mom, who has had a lot of orthopedic issues: “Go to Tria, that is all they do and they do it well”.  I called my insurance and found that Tria was in-network for me and also that I didn’t even need a referral; even better, there was a doctor who could see me sooner than my own physician.  So, on day 7, I went to Tria.  Dr. Gorman examined me then had more X-rays done because she was concerned about the posterior of my tibia-femur joint.  The new X-rays showed that I had a compression fracture of the tibia; luckily, it was between the two weight-bearing areas.   She ascertained that I needed an MRI.  She also warned me that we were going to find a disrupted ACL and told Kammy and me a bit about the procedure.

Old stairs and crutches = no fun

MRI

I’d never had an MRI before.  That sure was a long, noisy, somewhat uncomfortable experience!  Now I know what they mean when they say an MRI is awful if you’re claustrophobic.  I’m glad it was my knee and not my head in there!  Even so, I was in the ‘tube’ up to my mid-torso.  I got to wear some heavy headphones with a bunch of channels of bad music piped in.  (I could choose my bad music genre but it didn’t help much.)  I went in late on a Friday evening, one of the last of the week.  Of course, I’d have to wait ‘til Monday to get the news.

Second Dr. Visit

Monday morning we headed off for a 9AM visit with Dr. Gorman.  It took a while in the examination room because, apparently, they needed some lead-time to get the MRI processed and ready to look at.  Finally the doctor came in and showed us the results.  MRIs are pretty cool; it’s amazing how much you can see with them.  Less amazing was what we saw, which was the bad news that she was expecting…I had a ‘Disrupted Anterior Cruciate Ligament’, which meant it tore right through.  The unexpected news was that not only did I have a compression fracture of my Tibia, but also one in the Femur.  Thankfully, both were in non-weight-bearing parts of the joint.  Even better, though, was that neither resulted in any loose bone-fragments anywhere so the procedure for them was to just let them heal.

She went into more detail about the whole process.  First, I will have to recover from the initial injury.  Bones must mend; swelling must go down and I’ll have to regain the strength I lost from being immobilized the past week and a half.  Then, in 5 to 6 weeks I’ll have ACL Reconstruction surgery and have to start healing all over again.  She told me to get started on ‘prehab’ ASAP, and also referred me to a surgeon, Dr. Fetzer.

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Posted by Greg on May 29th, 2011 :: Filed under ACL Files

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I was on a 3 day ski trip to Lutsen, MN with a bunch of co-workers and friends.  On the 2^nd ski day of the trip, my boss broke his wrist on the terrain park when he launched off a very icy angled jump (the last feature in the park), on what would have been one of our last runs of the day anyway.  He got a ride down on a snowmobile and we finished out our ski day, which mostly consisted of working our way all the way back across Moose Mountain toward the main Chalet area.  We got beers and watched the surprisingly heavy snowfall and waited ‘til he came back from emergency in a brace.  His x-rays showed that he at least had a clean break.

On the last ski day only Chuck and I decided to go skiing.  Everyone else was skied out or (possibly) hung over.  We were interested in seeing how much snow had accumulated overnight in some of the trees!  We worked our way over to the terrain park on Moose Mountain (again) and started doing laps.  We’d start out on the run; Chuck was taking the big table-tops and I was either taking them (much slower) or videoing him going over.  Then we’d dodge into a tree run (coyote) to skiers left.  It was fairly open in most places, big hard icy moguls under about 6” of nice new snow.  It was just enough to make it fun.  We were hitting a few natural features, including a fallen tree that made a small drop-off jump.

Well, on about our 6^th lap through there I did something wrong.  Chuck was videotaping me as I skied the top 1/3 of it.  When I got to the little drop off jump I recall thinking to myself “I should go around that, I don’t even like it that much” but I hit it anyway.  Somehow, when I landed my left knee hyper-extended backwards; I think I must have hit the back side of a mogul on landing.  I was still moving down the hill thinking “OH MY GOD MY KNEE IS GOING BACKWARDS”. At the same time I also felt an ominous ‘pop’ and a crunchy/excruciating pain.  As I fell my knee ‘popped’ back in but my bindings still didn’t release and I ended up in a very awkward position on the ground, skis pointed uphill.

Chuck was recording the whole time, but as I got a ways past him he started boarding down behind me and didn’t have the camera on me for the actual accident.  The audio is intact though and you can hear me cursing and yelling for help.  He had his music turned up loud and didn’t realize for several seconds that I was hurt…he was razzing me when he suddenly realized something wasn’t right.  Then he stuffed the camera in his pocket and rushed in to help me out of my skis.

The pain was awful but it was also short lived.  After 2 minutes it was clearly abating…After 3 minutes I carefully changed positions.  At about 5 minutes I started to kid myself that maybe I was OK…I gingerly stood up using poles and left leg, then tried to apply a bit of weight to my hurt knee, BAD IDEA…OUCH!  Instantly sick to my stomach and thought it was going to hyper-extend again.  That’s when I knew my ski day (if not season) was at an end.  Chuck went down and got two Ski patrols to come.  They had to leave the snowmobile and sled out on the main run and bush-whack to me in the trees.  They checked me out, splinted the bad leg, got me into one ski and one on each side, post-holing the whole way, slid me out to the main run.  Then they strapped me in to the sled, Chuck hopped on the back of the snowmobile and the ski patrol drove us up to the patrol hut.  I was glad to have my helmet and goggles on; the snowmobile kicked up quite a bit of snow on the ride.  I was also very glad that there wasn’t too much pain…it was quite a rough ride.  My only regret from that part of this experience is that I didn’t take a video of my point-of-view riding on the sled…

By the time we got there my knee looked like a big old grapefruit.  They replaced the splint with a different, cardboard, disposable one that was mostly packaging tape.  They got me out of my ski boots and Chuck took me to the Grand Marais Hospital emergency room.  At the hospital they took X-rays which they though didn’t show breaks…more on that later.  The exam they did led them to believe that I had torn or disrupted some ligament or tendon in my knee, so they put me in a leg immobilizer and sent me off with a Vicodin prescription, which we filled at the pharmacy down the street.

We spent one more night in our condo, during which I learned that my body really doesn’t want me to mix Vicodin and beer (yes just like the label says not to do).  It kept me from getting much sleep at all.  Next morning we made the trek back to Minneapolis.

In my next post I’ll describe the wait to find out how bad my injury was…

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Posted by Greg on May 27th, 2011 :: Filed under ACL Files

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