Fix My Knee

My knee surgery saga started back in 1979, when I was 17. At the time I didn’t have any idea it would lead to the epic catalog of surgeries that eventually resulted. I was at a park one afternoon near my home, kicking around a soccer ball with some friends. We weren’t even playing soccer; I wasn’t a soccer player, nor were my friends. We were just hanging out, killing time before going to see a movie.

I kicked the ball, and my right knee locked up on me, just as it had done many times before. Except this time, when I tried to straighten my leg, the knee didn’t “pop” back into place. It stayed locked. I couldn’t bend it or straighten it. And it hurt. The other times it locked up, there wasn’t really any pain.

My friends took me home, and my parents took me to the hospital. (I could have saved myself some traveling — the park was right next door to the hospital.) At the hospital, they poked and prodded and X-rayed. Somehow they got my leg straight again, and sent me home with a prescription for painkillers and a referral to an orthopaedic surgeon.

Back in those days, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, arthroscopic surgery was only just appearing on the scene. Most surgeons didn’t do arthroscopy; arthroscopic surgery was mostly reserved for pro athletes. It was also more primitive than it is today, and it certainly wasn’t used for diagnostic purposes as it is today.

So my orthopaedic doc didn’t do an arthroscopy to find out what was wrong with my knee. X-rays don’t show cartilage. I don’t think MRIs even existed. What they used to do back then was a procedure right of of some Creature Feature torture chamber: the dreaded arthrogram. My orthopaedic doc sent me to an imaging lab for the arthrogram. At that point, my knee was doing pretty well; I walked into the imaging lab, but afterward, I could barely hobble back out on crutches.

The arthrogram consisted of the guy — doctor? radiologist? technician? I dunno; I was 17 — anyway, the guy in the lab injected some kind of dye, maybe iodine, into my knee. The dye clings to the surfaces of the cartilage and shows up on X-rays. After he injected the dye, he then used a giant syringe filled with air to blow up my knee like a balloon until it was the size of watermelon. Then he twisted my knee into several dozen different contortionist positions, making me hold each position while he X-rayed it.

I don’t know if they still do arthrograms today. But if anyone ever again tells me they want to do an arthrogram on me, I’ll tell them no thanks, I’d rather have bamboo shards stuck under my fingernails.

After the arthrogram, I was back on crutches for more than a week. My orthopaedic surgeon informed us that the arthrogram showed a torn lateral meniscus cartilage.

Tags: General Knee Surgery //