Day Zero

Today is a big day. Today is the first day I get to start building and looking to the future instead of not-so-patiently waiting for the surgeon's call to the operating room. I'll save the gory details of the surgery, aside from saying that the procedure was estimated to take about 40 minutes and it ended up lasting about 2 hours. The doctor found a lot more work to be done once he got inside. As such, my recovery might be a bit more prolonged and uncomfortable than originally estimated. At this point, I don't know when I'll be feeling good enough for PT or cycling or eventually running. But, when that stuff eventually happens, I'll be doing it with a knee that no longer has broken bone fragments and gnarled cartilage.

One interesting thing to note is the doctor is convinced that everything wrong with the knee was caused by a traumatic event, like a blunt force impact which broke part of the knee cap and began damaging the cartilage. Of course I'm guessing, but my gut tells me that I can pin-point the trauma to a night run back in 2010. JVG and I had been running for a town line going downhill on Mill Road in Durham when I slipped on ice fell head first down the hill. The first thing to make contact was my knee. The next day it was ballooned up, turned shades of green and purple, and I didn't run again for the next 9 months.

Back then I didn't have the kind of insurance that easily allowed for things like imaging and my attitude at the time was to just to be patient with injury. Let it rest and it will come around. It had occurred to me that maybe I had done damage like tore a meniscus even though, to this day, I'm not sure what that would even mean or feel like. In 2013 I got an MRI that would eventually show signs of mild arthritis, but the image fidelity wasn't precise enough to show the reality of the damage that was going on inside my knee. It confirmed to me that my meniscus and ligaments were all clear, and so moving forward, every time my knee flared up. I chalked it up to overuse.

This was not overuse, though. The surgery made the knee eternally better because the junk in there messing everything up is gone. The wounded cartilage is smoothed out, and the bone spurring has been eliminated. The future is far brighter than the past because I'll actually have the opportunity to train for more than few weeks without chronic, increasingly painful swelling, etc. Despite the pain I'm in currently as the knee heals, I'm so excited for the future. Today is day zero. The comeback begins!