What’s up with this darn knee

Today I had my first post-op appointment with the surgeon and am happy to report that my healing seems to be normal. The swelling and bruising I have now is more than some people experience ,but it isn't alarmingly so. (Phew! And I'd show pics but it is really not attractive.) I asked several questions about what I can do to prevent future injuries and knee pain. His main recommendation is to keep my weight down and to exercise. Check and check.

Then I asked a question I wasn’t really sure I wanted the answer to: Will I ever get back to running? The answer wasn’t exactly reassuring. He said you never really know but a lot of people can’t get back to running because the impact just causes too much pain. And that I will be able to physically run but it might cause so much pain that I might deem it not worth it. Ugh. I fought off tears as I thought about the feeling of a run on a sunny, breezy day. I don’t know if anything really compares (though I keep telling myself that I can learn to appreciate a bike ride on a sunny breezy day just as much). As I tried not to cry like a baby, I kept telling myself, SOME people can’t run. That’s not ALL people. Time will tell. The last time I had knee surgery I wanted to run a half-marathon one year after surgery. It didn’t happen. I had nagging pain and never got back to running. I’m setting the same goal this time around and hoping for different results.

So here’s the fun part for you readers, hopefully you’re still with me! The doc gave me pictures of the inside of my knee from the scope they did for surgery. It’s kind of hard to tell what is going on, but I’ll try my best to describe what was described to me. And before I begin with the before and after pictures and poor attempts to describe them…I should give some reference to the readers who aren’t familiar with a meniscus. My way of describing them is the cushion that supports your knee—all the impact your knees take mean the joint needs a little padding. You have two different kinds: the medial which is under your kneecap on the inside of your leg and the lateral which is under your kneecap on the outer side of your leg.

Medial Meniscus: The first picture is before surgery and the second picture is after surgery. On the before picture where there is kind of a black hole, that is where my meniscus should be, but it is torn and flipped forward which shows up as the white blobby, stringy thing to the left of the black hole. (Does that make sense?) If you look at the after picture you can see that the blobby, stringy thing is gone and that shows that they took it out and cleaned it up. And yes “blobby, stringy thing” is an official medical term. And I can’t tell in these pictures but apparently “most” of my meniscus is no longer there.

Okay, so these two pictures are my lateral meniscus. They didn’t know I had a tear here until they got into my knee for surgery. It wasn’t as significant as the medial meniscus because nothing was displaced. They just shaved off the torn part and you can see in the pictures that second one is “cleaner” than the first

Also, I find it really kind of funny that I cry at the thought of not running again while millions of people cry at the thought of having to run and would love the excuse of "I have a bad knee."