{"id":105,"date":"2011-06-14T00:50:33","date_gmt":"2011-06-14T00:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/?p=105"},"modified":"2011-06-14T00:50:33","modified_gmt":"2011-06-14T00:50:33","slug":"prehab-week-3-and-graft-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/?p=105","title":{"rendered":"Prehab Week 3 and Graft Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prehab Week 3<\/h3>\n

During this week I kept improving my efforts, working toward the goals.\u00a0 My physical therapist added Step-Downs to the mix.\u00a0 They were my new least-favorite; painful!\u00a0 I started out with a pretty small step, about 2 high\u201d.\u00a0 My leg felt so uncomfortable that I tried stepping down with my uninjured knee and then modeling the movements as close as possible with the injured one.\u00a0 I found it really helped to put my hands on my hips to help feel that I was doing it symmetrically.<\/p>\n

Researching and Choosing a graft type<\/h3>\n

Also, during this week, I started to do more research about my three choices for graft.\u00a0 In the day after my first meeting with the surgeon I\u2019d decided that the allograft (dead guy tissue) was the better choice for me.\u00a0 But, as I talked everyone\u2019s ear off about my upcoming surgery I started to rethink my decision.\u00a0 It turned out that (unknowingly) I knew quite a few ACL reconstruction recipients.\u00a0 Their stories were all interesting to me.\u00a0 From there I turned to the internet.\u00a0 I read a lot of people\u2019s stories of their accidents and reconstructions, read surgeon reports about this vs. that.\u00a0 I learned that there are a lot of opinions in the orthopedic world about the 3 choices.\u00a0 What started to emerge, though, was that allograft was not considered to be nearly as strong as autograft.\u00a0 Between the patellar autograft and hamstring autograft the prognosis was very similar as far as I could tell except for this statistic: one study showed a high incidence of significant knee pain when kneeling 5 years after their surgery with patellar autograft.\u00a0 (I can\u2019t seem to find the study that gave percentages\u2026)<\/p>\n

As a result of conversations with friends who\u2019d had the surgery, reading stories of ACL reconstruction on people\u2019s blogs, and other internet research I changed my decision; I\u2019d go with a hamstring autograft instead of an allograft as long as the surgeon agreed with my decision.<\/p>\n

Here are some blogs and articles that I used to come to my decisions:<\/p>\n

The procedure:<\/p>\n