Scope and Clean

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen my multiple excited tweets yesterday about a special event that is soon to come: my long-awaited knee surgery.

Yup, that’s right – on November 13, I will finally have knee surgery for the damage from knee arthritis! This has been 3.5 years in the making.

Over the past 3.5 years, I have dislocated my knee and subluxated it (it moves around but doesn’t come out of the groove of the joint), spent more time in physical therapy than out, had a cortisone injection, and worn my knee brace more than I haven’t. It has been a rough journey (to say the least) with so many tears and it was ultimately the reason why I had to quit my job.

My new surgeon says that I have what’s called a chondral flap. The cartilage under my kneecap has come away from the actual knee, acting like a door hinge, which it isn’t supposed to do. He showed me this on the x-ray and on the knee model, and explained that this is what caused the popping feeling (which happened when I dislocated it back at the beginning of August).

The surgery that I will have is called an anthroscopy. He’ll make 3 small incisions and insert a camera to see everything, take pictures (which is AWESOME seeing how I’ll probably have knee issues off and on over the rest of my life – or at least until it’s damaged enough to get replaced – so I like having excellent records), and repair the damage.

I am over the moon about this. First of all, I was beginning to doubt that I would be able to have surgery by January. Having it in just a month and a half is wonderful news to me. It’s also so great because now I have plenty of time to recover from surgery and get my arthritis under control before I (hopefully) go to graduate school next fall. I may even be able to do more work and/or get a part-time job and work outside of my house! (I’m practically giddy at the thought of that haha.)

So now I just need to take the GRE lit subject test, the GRE general test, get my stuff in order for surgery, and by Thanksgiving my knee will be cleaned out. And I’m PUMPED.