Surgery Info

A lot of people have been asking me about my surgery and what happened, so I figured I'd write a quick blog about it. Basically I was missing a lot of cartilage in my knee (for all of you who actually know anything about knees... I had level 3 OCD which is apparantly the worst kind)

I was casted from the top of my thigh to my ankle for 3 months in 7th grade and then had a surgery in 8th grade along with all the physical therapy that went with it. Eventually, being an 8th grader, I kind of just acted like it was better so the drs, pt and crutches would stop... but it never actually felt better...and in the last 2-3 years it just kept feeling worse and worse and worse.... so after some more pt, x-rays and MRIs, we decided on another surgery...this time a cartilage transplant....

I had a MosaicPlasty, which is basically:

A cartilage transfer procedure uses healthy cartilage from a normal area of the knee, and moves it to a damaged area of the knee. The two types of cartilage transfer procedures are called:
Mosaicplasty. A mosaicplasty moves round 'plugs' of cartilage and underlying bone to damaged areas. The plugs are each a few millimeters in diameter, and when multiple plugs are moved into a damaged area the result is a mosaic appearance--the multiple small plugs of cartilage look like mosaic tiles.

More info here

I will spare you the immediately following surgery bloody civil war wound looking pictures and show you the cleaned up version of the post-op. Pretty swollen and gruesome, but I'm thrilled he was able to do it with only 5 small cuts instead of the enormous 12+ inch incision he was planning on making vertically down my leg..

It's been one week down on crutches (no weight bearing at all) and at least 5 weeks to go. My first post-op doctor's appt is tomorrow so we'll see how everything looks!

I have the best friends ever and appreciate the visits, flowers, cards, emails, etc that have made this past week much more bearable...