Warning: this post contains medical details that might be unsettling.

I was going to post a bit more about the nature of my knee injury. This is my personal understanding of the injury; please don't take it as medical advice or mistake any of this for real medical knowledge.

The knee is a complicated joint: there are three major bones and a stabilising plate involved - the femur in the thigh, the fibia and tibula in the lower leg, and the patella (or knee cap) to tie the whole thing together.

Where the femur meets each of the fibia and tibula is a semicircular pad of cartilage called a meniscus. The one on the inside of the knee is called the medial meniscus.

Now, it seems that I have had some damage to my medial meniscus for a long time - a tear which runs parallel to the circumference of the meniscus. I am pretty sure I know when this tear happened, and it was about eighteen years ago - my knee has never been quite the same since. Naturally, ever since that time the cartilage has been degrading further.

What seems to have happened recently is that a couple of new radial tears have been introduced which mean that there is a little loose flap of cartilage on the inside edge of the medial meniscus. These tears mean that my knee is less resistant to the kinds of lateral stresses introduced when you cross your legs, say.

However, the pain really starts when this flap folds over and tucks under the meniscus.

Ow.

As I mentioned before, the treatment for this is surgery because that is the only way to stabilise the meniscus. This surgery is going to be done with an arthroscope, so the surgeon will make an incision in the side of my knee and poke the arthroscope inside where various clever tools will be used to cut away the damaged tissue and then remove it.

Total time in surgery should be about an hour. I will be completely out of commission for that day (apparently I will have a femoral shunt which will shut my left leg down entirely), then on crutches for two or three days after that.

The aim is for me to be back in the office five days after surgery. My understanding is that I should be back to more or less normal function in a few weeks.

Still got to schedule it, though. This is one of those things where the surgery is not actually urgent, but the effects of my dodgy knee are with me every day. Then again, being even less functional for several weeks over summer is a bit of a bugger too.

Lots of careful work with calendars is needed here...

Posted by Dunx at April 29, 2008 04:12 PM