Patella issues
Last year I started seeing a physiotherapist regarding my knee problems. After several visits with somewhat limited improvement, she referred me back to my doctor. I saw my gp, who referred me to an orthopedic surgeon and I first met him last month. After some examination and discussion of issues, he surmised there are actually two problems occurring. Firstly, I seem to have some sort of cartilage tear behind my patella and that’s causing the pain on one side. That is relatively easy to repair using a keyhole procedure called a knee arthroscopy. The second problem is my patella tracks well off to the side of my knee instead of up and down like it should. He sent me for a CT scan which confirms this and also shows it’s a bilateral problem. Correcting this problem requires something called a tibial tubercle transfer, which essentially moves bits around so that my patella tracks up and down again. It requires open surgery and an overnight stay in the hospital. I agreed to have the surgery but did have some concerns as to whether I was being rushed into it.
The Scientist suggested I go back to the physiotherapist to discuss from that perspective so I went to see her last week. She read the report of the CT scan and was of the opinion that I should go ahead with the surgery. She even asked if anything was said about my right knee, which rather surprised me as I don’t have nearly the same problems there. The physio seems to think having this surgery may prevent me ending up with a total knee replacement twenty years down the road. More importantly, she didn’t think the recovery would be all that bad as I will be fully weight bearing from the start. From what I’ve been reading, this seems to be reduce recovery time significantly.
Anyway, my surgery is booked for April 4th which hopefully will give me enough time to recover so that I might miss only one term of my tai chi class this year. The physio even suggested I might be able to get back to it much sooner but I will just have to wait and see how it all goes. And fortunately I only have to fast from 7am and don’t arrive for admissions until 11am. So no rushing out into early morning traffic for us.
