My Road To Recovery From an ACL Tear – Injury Fallout
I tore my ACL playing pickleball. Yes, pickleball, and I know that’s embarrassing. If you’re not familiar, pickleball is like tennis but on a much smaller court and with a holey ball that moves much slower than a tennis ball, which has earned it names like “old person’s tennis” and “the safest sport of all time.” Well, I hate to break it to you, but after surviving a collegiate tennis career, skiing tree runs and moguls all over Colorado, and practicing martial arts for the past year with my worst injury being tendinitis, I can safely assure you that pickleball is actually the MOST dangerous sport in the world. Just kidding.
In my defense, I play pickleball pretty much the same was as I play tennis: 100% effort and a lot of erratic movement. In this particular instance, I planted my right foot to cut left and felt my right knee pretty much explode: there were more pops than I can count and I knew I was headed for surgery before I hit the ground.
Currently, I’m 3 days post-injury and my experience has been pretty similar to what most of my patients tell me after they have knee injuries. I was able to walk off the court under my own power and got in my car as fast as possible, because I knew I didn’t have much time to drive home before my leg became useless. As expected, by the time I got home, I could barely put any weight on my right leg and within 2 hours I was using crutches. The pain and swelling continued to get worse through the next day, but then it actually improved the day after. After a solid sauna session where I slowly extended my knee until it was more or less straight, I was able to start putting about 25% of my weight through the leg with walking with crutches. Today is more of the same, with a little more capacity for bearing weight and less pain with every step.
There have been a couple things that have stood out to me since the injury. First, the moment of the injury seems surreal at this point. My brain has replayed the moment so many times, that I don’t even recoil at the memory any more. It also seems like it happened a long time ago, not just 3 days ago. It’s amazing how a normally-functioning brain (some might question applying to classification to me) is capable of reducing the perceived trauma of an event. I shouldn’t be too surprised, because there’s plenty of research that shows similar findings. The one concept in particularly that I’m thinking of is that if you ask someone to rate the overall pain experienced from a certain task, they will rate it as the average of the worst overall pain during the event and the pain at the very end. In my situation, since the pain is consistently improving, I believe my brain keeps coming up with a lower and lower average of how bad the event actually was, which leads to a perception that the injury itself wasn’t as bad.
In a similar vein, the other thought that comes to mind is what happens when you put an experience into words. In studies that examine people who have had “mystical” experiences, they find that the activity in the brain changes as soon as the person puts their experience into words. As I have repeatedly described what happened to people, I think my brain has begun to remove the emotional component and replaced it with a more objective memory. (I briefly tried to find references for these last 2 paragraphs, but couldn’t find any quickly; I recognize the irony in recalling research from memory while talking about how the brain transforms memories over time).
I should be getting a MRI this week, which will give a fuller picture of what’s going on. In the meantime, there’s not much point to me pontificating about what might be messed up. I plan to post throughout my recovery process and will be creating what I hope is the best guide you can find to optimizing your recovery from an ACL repair, because if I can’t do that – as a physical therapist – then I should probably lose my license.
Western Slope Rehab and Performance is Here to Help
If you are struggling with injuries or have recently been in a motor vehicle accident, we can help. We are a physical therapy company that provides home-based orthopedic services in the Grand Junction, CO, area, as well as telehealth appointments throughout Colorado. If you would like to schedule a free consultation, you can call us as 970-462-9177, or fill out our contact form here.
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