First Surgeon Visit

The appointment at HSS today went really well. The surgeon patiently answered all of my questions which he has probably answered a million times before. We went through the MRIs in detail which was interesting and got a much better picture of what had happened in my knee.

On the MRI you can see the bone bruising on the front of the femur joint and the back of the tibia joint in the form of light white speckles. This shows exactly where the two bones jarred against each other when I dislocated my knee.

Also, the meniscus tear is evident on the MRI. It's torn on the edge and goes right the way through. The surgeon said he'd shave off the area around the tear in a semi circle so that the tear is basically cut out of the meniscus and cannot tear any further.

Surgeon tugged around on my legs and wiggled my knees to get an idea of looseness in my knees and also tested range of motion which was good, I think he said zero to 140 degrees.

So turns out there is another choice to make. Either the ACL reconstruction surgery can be done with a donor tendon from a cadaver (allograft) or it can be harvested from another part of my body (autograft). We talked a long time about this and seems there is no easy decision to be made here, there are pros and cons to both. Mmmm... more research required here.

In the meantime the surgeon has ordered a donor tendon (achilles I think) in case I decide to have the allograft. Apparently I can make this decision as late as the day before my surgery without any financial penalty.

Got given a bunch of instructions for pre-surgery, some exercises to do with the knee.

Surgery scheduled for October 13th.