It’s been a while since I’ve done an update on my broken knee, so here it is.
If this is your first visit to my humble blog, you can find out what happened to me here and here. Short version: I was crossing the street one night in February, about a month after moving to DC. I had the Walk sign and I was within the crosswalk. I got hit by a State Department security vehicle. A big black SUV. It turned the corner and ran right into me, knocked me down. Got me right in the knee and shattered my tibial plateau. I had surgery 2 days later to repair it, and I spent a week in the hospital. (If you want to see what it looked like back then, go here.) Oh, and I got a jaywalking ticket for my trouble.
So that sucked. Six months later, here’s what it looks like:
After months of painful recovery and physical therapy and struggling to walk without crutches again, I went back to my surgeon a few weeks ago for what I thought was going to be my last visit. Most of the pain is finally gone, both from the knee itself and from the leg muscles that atrophied because I couldn’t put weight on it for months and months. I had a good feeling about the whole thing. All that agony, all that misery was in the past. I was almost free and clear.
But of course not. The x-ray showed that the shattered bone they reassembled back in February was starting to cave in. This is not good. The surgeon said I’d probably need a bone graft from a donor to replace the weakened bone, and they’d need to take out the metal rod that’s in there now.
I got a CAT scan last week, and I went back to the surgeon this morning. He referred me to another surgeon in the same office who specializes in those types of surgeries. He said I could either get it fixed sometime relatively soon, or take my chances that it’s not going to get any worse. But if I wait, chances are I’ll need a total knee replacement, and I’m way too young for that. While it’s nice to hear the word “young,” it is not so nice to hear the words “knee replacement.”
He printed off a bunch of information about the surgery so I can mull it over, and I’ve got a followup appointment in a couple of weeks. So that’s what I’m thinking about now. It’s pretty much the only thing I can think about now.
In other news, the State Department left the Taliban off their list of terrorist organizations, and they’re paying for the guy who’s trying to build a mosque at Ground Zero to go on some sort of goodwill tour of the Middle East. I’ll let you guys know when I receive any sort of goodwill gesture from the State Department.
P.S. Osteochondral allograft.