Thoughts on my knee injury (at 10 weeks)

Things I learned (or finally understood) at my knee appointment last Thursday:

• My injury was pretty bad. The partial ACL tear and tibial plateau fracture especially, but as a whole it was a bigger deal than I think I let myself really believe when I focusing on not making to worse. There was a lot of swelling inside my knee and there is still is in some parts.
• Injuries take a long time to heal. Especially bone fractures, even one described as “hairline.”
• The swelling and soreness I am still experiencing is due to the fracture, which should be healed within three months of the initial injury. And when I start running it will be the injury that will be letting me know if it’s not ready (with continued swelling and soreness).
• The appointment on Thursday was a final follow up. I saw my sports medicine doctor right after my injury, about a month after that and then about a month after that. The assumption is that I will heal and eventually be able to return to my activities. My next physical therapy appointment (late May) is also my last. I am supposed to reach out and make another appointment only if my knee continues to bother me.
• My sports medicine doctor is leaving Kaiser. Actually she already left. Friday was her last day. So if I do need to make another appointment, it will be with someone who knows nothing about me and my injury. Sigh.
• The Sports Medicine Department will not provide effective strategies for alleviating my back pain that are not “take this prescription strength NSAID daily.” Every time I mentioned my back pain the comment was ignored. I left feeling pretty defeated. (I originally saw this doctor for my back so it’s not like I was bringing it up for the first time at a knee appointment.)
• I am an incredibly impatient person, I do not know how or when to rest (especially now that I’ve found that chronic pain returns after rest anyway), I hate not feeling strong and capable in my body, and I easily spiral into “this will never get better” thinking, even though other persistent pain issues have improved in the past (even if they’ve not completely resolved).

My knee has felt more sore lately than I feel like ever before. Maybe this is because I haven’t been wearing my brace for about two weeks. I thought my brace was only there to protect my knee in case of tripping or falling, but of course it was also providing stability and support as I walked around. It also might be that I am expecting my knee to be better now, so I’m more aware of feelings of tightness that have always been there. Either way I’ve been pretty disappointed in how tight it still feels and in how sore the muscles around it generally feel.

I was cleared to start “walk/running” in two weeks. This will look like a 30 minutes walk/run split into six 5-minute interval. The first time I will run for 30 seconds and then walk for 4.5 minutes every five minutes. The second time I will fun for a minute and walk for four minutes of every five minute interval, and so on until I am running for the entire 30 minutes.

Last Friday I went down to the great highway and “power walked” for about three miles. The weather was beautiful and it felt amazing being out in the sun, but I didn’t love the actual walking. I couldn’t get my heart rate up and I felt clumsy moving my body in such a foreign way.

For several days after my first power walk, my legs felt pretty awful, especially my right leg. My shins were on fire and the muscles around my quads were weirdly sore. I’m obviously not accustomed to using the muscles activated by walking that way, and my right leg is especially weak when it comes to maintaining a smooth gait.

I went for a second power walk today. It was similarly underwhelming despite beautiful weather. I do appreciate being outside but I don’t really enjoy anything else about it. I plan to power walk 2-3 more times before my first “walk/run” later this month. I hope my legs don’t get as sore this time (or in the future) as they did after the first attempt).

I do think my tibial plateau fracture is going give me the most grief moving forward. It’s the right side of my knee that still feels sore, and that aches when I try to bend my knee. It’s clearly still swollen around that injury in the joint. Hopefully it will get better eventually, but I highly doubt that by June it will feel normal again. There is just no way to know if, or when, it will feel like it used to. There is a high likelihood that it will never feel the same, that bending it will always cause discomfort and that I’ll never really like sitting in some positions ever again. I’m slowly letting those possibilities take up more space in my brain, and learning not to spiral when I entertain them. If you’d told me a month ago that I might never feel comfortable sitting on the floor again I would have burst out crying. I have cried about it several times. Now I feel really sad about that possibility, but it doesn’t make me cry. At least not every time. And that is progress.

It’s been harder to keep up my rehab exercises now that my test has passed. It’s even harder now that I’m realizing that I can’t really strengthen anything to get my knee to bend. That will happen when the swelling subsides, and there is nothing I can do to make that happen faster. In fact, trying to bend my knee could just aggravate that injury, causing it to swell more, or for longer. I’m not sure how I’m going to keep up all the exercises – they require about 30 minutes a day, split up over 2-3 sessions, and it’s hard to make time for them when I know they won’t help with the one thing I want to get better.

I’m honestly struggling with quite a few aspects of being injured at this point. I know that 10 weeks of managing an injury isn’t that long, especially since it could bear weight the whole time. I was never even on crutches! And yet it feels like my knee has been stuck in this stage for a long time, which makes it feel like I will never move past it. This is likely because it felt better quickly and then was strong enough for me to return to martial arts quickly too. I try to remind myself that I’ve been stalled out at this stage because I got to it so quickly, and that I’m very lucky to have spent so little time in the early, shaky, scary phase.

And that is where I am at 10 weeks out from my knee injury, trying to remain aware of how serious the injury was, while recognizing how lucky I am that it wasn’t worse, and also accepting the uncertainty of how it will feel in the future. It’s not an easy place to be, but I know it could be worse.