Ericka's Knee Surgery - April 2002

It all started with...

Heck I don't know when this all started, really. Over time my right knee started bugging me more and more. Any impact exercise would aggravate it and it was very crunchy sounding. Over time it got swollen after activity and would ache. Aleve and ice became my friend. Last year I started to try to do a walking program to try to lose weight, but it would hurt and I'm not much for exercising through pain. I finally broke down and went to go see my orthopedist - Joann Halbrecht at the Boulder Institute for Sports Medicine. She's awesome (and it's also a rarity to find a female ortho surgeon). We started on physical therapy 3 times a week, which at first seemed to help, and then just started making my foot hurt more. I quit physical therapy after several months after a flight where my knee locked up and kept giving out of me for several days afterwards. Yay - happy christmas to me. After a few months of pouting - I went back to Joann and told her about it. She said it was time to discuss surgery - so we scheduled it for april, and I had it. Still in recovery from it, (physical therapy 3 times a week) but doing pretty well!

My non-technical explanation for why my knee is hurt

Ok, I'm no ortho (tho my mom is an ortho-nurse) *GRIN*.
Here's the scoop. I'm deformed. No, seriously. My fibula (the little bone on the side of your lower leg) is attached to my tarsus (the ankle bone) too far back.
What this does is pull my right foot out to the side (like a duck walk, but only on my right foot).
After 25 years of wear (and a lot of weight on it to boot) - my kneecap began to compensate for the pull of my leg to the right by moving over to the right. Unfortunately - you don't want your kneecap anywhere but the center of your knee. Essentially, it began tearing itself apart. See all the nice "crab meat" photos for what happened to my cartilage. When the patella (kneecap) doesn't track correctly, it gets inflamed, which makes it track even worse. It tears and gets damaged. Somewhere along the line I tore my meniscus too (the little half moon shaped cartilage between your tibia and fibia).

The Surgery itself

So the point of the surgery was to do a lateral release and to clean up the damaged cartliage. The lateral release is a cutting of a tendon to allow the kneecap back over to a correct location. Unfortunately - we were unable to do this fully - but it is further over in the right direction now than it was before. Basically I look at this as a way to buy me time while I lose weight.