Knee surgery

It's been exactly 6 weeks since I had knee surgery. I've had many people tell me I should put something about my ordeal on my site so here it is. A little background: this was the first time I’ve ever had any kind of surgery or hospital stay in my life. I have all my wisdom teeth, tonsils, appendix etc. I’ve only ever had a couple of stitches here and there and that’s about it. So this whole experience was new and entirely filled with unknowns for me.

I completely ruptured my left knee patellar tendon while playing softball on Friday, June 29^th. I was chasing down a foul ball and was sliding to make the catch to break my momentum since I was approaching the fence. However I was closer to the fence than I realized and I went knee-first into the fence post pretty much at full speed. And no, I didn’t catch the ball; the ball was in my mitt but schwacking the fence with my knee was a bit distracting and it popped right out. Strangely enough it didn’t hurt but I knew something was wrong when I was laying there on the ground and couldn’t move my leg, plus I could see my kneecap sitting up on my thigh; not cool. So blah blah blah, my kneecap wasn’t attached to the tendon and I needed surgery. I met with my surgeon on Monday the 2^nd. He went over the whole situation with me and was very clear and concise. The surgery was conducted at the Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan on July 3^rd and I was released from the hospital on July 4^th. So my 4^th of July was not all that much fun.

Even though this was a major procedure, it’s pretty routine and went well. The surgeon used Kevlar fiber-wire to reattach the tendon to the kneecap and sewed up the other damaged tissue around the area. Fortunately I didn’t do any damage to any of the other ligaments or tendons in my knee so that helped make the procedure fairly straight forward. I was in pretty bad pain for the first few days and I was thankful that I had a friend to stay with who lived right next to the hospital. Yokosuka is over an hour drive from my house and I don’t think I could have handled that long of a drive in the condition I was in.

Fast forward several weeks and here we are. I’ve been doing physical therapy for the past few weeks now and have been making significant progress. I just came off crutches this past Monday (Aug 13^th) and am using a cane. My flexibility is coming back slowly but steadily and I’m just on the doorstep of the 60° threshold. Right now the goal is getting to 90° of flexibility. All my physical therapy up to this point has been focused on flexibility but I should be starting on regaining strength within the next few weeks.

So what else can I say? This has been a major life experience for me. I can’t say enough how thankful I’ve been for the support from my squadron-mates here in Japan. They’ve been driving me to work and on errands and making sure I have food and groceries. Getting around on crutches was a huge pain in the ass so I’m happy to be using only a cane now. I’m really looking forward to getting rid of the leg immobilizer as well. At least I don’t have to sleep with that thing on anymore, that was wearing me out. So I’ll try to do a better job of keeping updates coming on this site. Thanks for all the good wishes, positive vibes, and support. Beat Army.