My Left Knee: Prologue

Hello readers: I am creating a book about recovering from my ACL injury. Here is the a draft of the prologue to the book. -- Lauren

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It is not like my heart was broken—literally or metaphorically—but still this was tough. It wasn’t a permanent injury, either: people heal from torn ACLs all of the time. I wasn’t examining my mortality like I would with a cancer diagnosis, but I was contemplating how my lack of mobility impacted my ability to function. I felt like I had to put my brain on hold for months while I took care of my body. It was a challenge.

My initial injury from a skiing accident was bad enough that I couldn’t walk for almost a month without crutches, a knee brace, or both. After the surgery to repair my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)—the short ligament that connects the kneecap to the thigh bone, I was back in the brace and on crutches for weeks. Even after I could technically “walk,” I wasn’t very good at it. My gait was off, I was incredibly slow, and I couldn’t walk very far without my leg revolting, begging me to slow down or stop. The trivia of my old life—making breakfast, walking down stairs, and bathing—suddenly became the main event. After my injury and during my recovery, I saw life through the eyes of a person with a disability. For months, my biggest worry was if I could cross the street before the traffic light changed. At times, it seemed like I would never get better, but I did.

This is a survival story of sorts. Unlike Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, I didn’t go to faraway lands for my uncomfortable journey. I mostly stayed on my couch icing and elevating my leg when I wasn’t at the gym. My enemy wasn’t an Orc, but my own body. Unlike Sir Ernest Shackleton combating the Antarctic Ocean, my hostile environment was my home. The twenty-three steps to my house were like icebergs crashing into my vessel, making it both dangerous and onerous for me to leave my house.

There are worse things that can happen to people other than not being able to move, and yet for me, there was something primally disturbing about it. In modern times, we have wheelchairs, ramps and the American with Disabilities Act (ADA). I don’t need to outrun a bear or lion or chase prey for dinner, but what if a fire broke out in my home or there was a mass shooting in a shopping mall: how would I escape? How could I dodge a car backing out in a parking lot if I couldn’t run? As long as I had limited mobility, I felt mildly unsafe, and that was not a comfortable feeling.

The month before my skiing crash, I ran for school board and lost after a year of campaigning. Every day during the campaign, my calendar was full. When I hurt my knee, I was in a post-election lull with very little to do. After I hurt my knee, I had even less to do, which I was surprised was possible. Countless people who struggle with the inability to move lead interesting and productive lives. I was not one of them. Two major unpleasant and unexpected side effects of my injury were isolation and boredom.

Before I had my skiing crash, I had imagined that life with an injury or major illness would be a time to slow down from day-to-day stress, ponder what is important in life, read great books, watch great movies, and find inner peace. If I couldn’t find inner peace, then it would be time to be pampered like a princess. When I was in elementary school, friends of mine were lucky enough to break bones, have their tonsils out or get the chicken pox. I had none of those experiences. Dee Dee had a party when she broke her arm. She sat on the couch wrapped in an afghan while we sat around her in a circle and gave her presents. When Lisa had her tonsils out, she got ice cream every meal and got to miss a week of school. While I knew it wasn’t all fun to be sick, there was certainly an upside.

I should have known better. As a parent, I know that when a child is ill, parents do everything possible to make their child comfortable and/or distracted. Instead of this being a time of ease and introspection, I was learning to walk, ride a bike, climb stairs, hop, jump, swim, and run. W. Timothy Gallwey writes in The Inner Game of Tennis about Self 1, the talking and thinking part of our minds, and Self 2, the muscle memory “doing” part of our minds. All of the actions and activities with my legs that used to be automatic now needed to be relearned. My Self 1 had to step in and guide the way because the muscles that Self 2 relied on stopped working.

Unlike the flu where you lie in bed until you feel better, I had to work to get better. My new job was to rehabilitate my knee with the help of the University of Washington’s Sports Medicine Clinic. Getting better involved twice a week physical therapy appointments plus an hour or more of exercises every day. Their goal was to return me to sport, in my case, skiing. My goal was to move without limitations. If I wanted to ski, I could ski. If I wanted to dance, I could dance. If I wanted to play tennis, hike, climb stairs or walk my dog, I could play tennis, hike, climb stairs and walk my dog. I didn’t think this was too much to ask. I was forty-six at the time—too young to permanently assign myself to be a spectator and not a participant.

You might be reading this book because you tore your ACL, or maybe your spouse or child did. Perhaps you are a physical therapist who wants to know more about your patients’ life outside of your office. My experience may be different than yours. I am a middle-aged woman with two teenage kids and aging parents. I am married to a doctor, but I am not a doctor, a nurse or anything related to medicine. You might be a young athlete or an old couch potato. You might be curious to read this book to compare your experience to mine. In some areas, I was better than average. In others, worse.

Please note that the research-based protocols and milestones may have changed since the time this was written. For example, a few years before my surgery, continuous motion machines were in vogue. Now they are not. Treatments evolve, and sometimes you will get caught in the middle of those changes. While I can’t imagine what your experience will be like, I can say ice became my new best friend during my recovery. I don’t think human anatomy will evolve that much in a few years such that ice won’t be an effective way to reduce swelling.

I have several friends who tore their ACLs before I did. I didn’t pay attention to what was going on with them before or after their surgeries, probably because they didn’t leave their homes for a few months. After I had torn my ACL, I asked them tons of questions about the recovery process. They all had massive amnesia.

“When did you get out of the brace?” I had asked Michelle before I had my surgery.

“I think it was around a month or so. Maybe six weeks. Maybe eight. I don’t remember,” she said. She didn’t understand this was the most urgent question I had.

“When were you able to walk again without crutches?” I’d ask Greta.

“Ahhh….” She couldn’t remember.

I wanted answers and information on what it was like and how they survived. They were not helpful.

My physical therapist, Evan, was also not forthcoming with information. He is a one-day-at-a-time guy, giving me information on a need-to-know basis, whereas I wanted to know everything I was going to go through in the next year right now.

This book started out as a blog where I would track the ups and downs of my recovery. I figured out that I, too, would have massive amnesia. Amnesia can be a good thing—it helps you to forget your misery so you can move on. I didn’t want to forget, so I wrote everything down. I wanted to look back and remember and say, “Look how far I’ve come!”

This book isn’t about how I found spiritual enlightenment through an injury. I was too focused on survival to achieve self-actualization. It is about how I embraced reading People magazine on the exercise bike at the gym and watching television during the day while doing leg lifts. My saving grace wasn’t an appreciation of how much my health and family meant to me. My salvation came from the endorphins I got from forty-five minutes of cardiovascular exercise every day.

As a lapsed Catholic, I welcomed the suffering. These were my forty days in the desert, minus the crucifixion at the end. Suffering gave me the motivation to do my exercises so I could escape the miserableness of limited mobility.

The ups and downs of healing were real, and a continuous part of the process. I remember years ago riding my bike on the Tour of the Mississippi River Valley, (a.k.a. The TOMRV). The ride from Davenport to Dubuque, Iowa and back had one stretch of fifteen miles of roller hills. I call them roller hills because riding them was like riding a roller coaster. I would pedal downhill as hard as I could in my highest gears, and the momentum and speed would lift me up over the next hill. This repeated itself again and again for miles. It was exhilarating. This reminded me of my recovery minus the speed, momentum, and exhilaration. As soon as I made it over one hurdle in my recovery, I would be so pleased with myself. Then I would meet the next hill and start a new climb. Before I went into surgery, my dad told me, “It is all uphill from here. But when you get to the top, you will be in really great shape.”

I hope you find this book helpful on your path to recovery. Heal well!