So, my dear friends, to add icing to the cake, I found out on Friday that I have a completely torn lateral meniscus in my right knee. Who knew? My sister-in-law had one once (hers wasn’t a complete tear) and she said that it is terribly painful. The doctor sent me to physical therapy when I told him it was bothering me, but now he wants me to see an orthopedic doctor. Seriously?
This all started about six weeks ago. I stood up from bed and my knee went “pop”. Let me add here that since we are remodeling the house, the bed is not on a frame; it’s just the mattress and box springs on the floor, so it is a little bit lower than normal. I guess you could say that I stood up from a semi-squatting position. Anyway, so my knee popped and hurt like hell when it did, but the pain got better in a couple of hours. It did swell up and make me limp for about a week, but that got better so I was thinking that if I gave it enough time it would heal. This happened once before on vacation in 2009 that I stood up from a squatting position and it popped, but within the week it was better. So there I was thinking that it would just get better on its own like before…wrong! After about a month of it still bothering me, and I still wasn’t walking quite right, I started to think that maybe I had better get it checked out. Since I am on pain medication daily for the chronic adhesion pain maybe it was downplaying the pain in my knee too. So off I go to the GP (a new one by the way which so far I am liking much better than the other) and he orders the physical therapy and an MRI. The next day after the MRI he emails me to let me know that I have a tear in the lateral meniscus and he wants me to see an orthopedic doctor. Well, since I had no clue what a meniscus was, what else can I do but google it. Oh boy! As if that wasn’t bad enough, the nurse calls to make sure that I had gotten the message and answer any questions. I wanted to know “really, how bad is it? What does the MRI report say?” So she tells me that the report claims that I have a “complete bucket tear in the lateral meniscus”. So then I look that up. From what I saw it doesn’t look very good! I guess we’ll see what the orthopedic doctor says when I get in to see him. My sister-in-law had to have surgery on her incomplete tear. Have any of you guys had this or know someone who has? Am I really looking at surgery for this? Please comment and let me know. Heck, maybe they could do all three surgeries the same day instead of just the two. Talk about recoup time!
P.S. Update. I have a complete lateral bucket handle type tear of the right meniscus.
Joynpain2 