My ACL Surgery Recovery Journey As a Physiotherapist

on the opening kickoff of a football game i was tackled in a way that caused my left knee to twist inwards i felt it tweak but i managed to turn my physio brain off for long enough to convince myself to go back into the game of course two plays later i was hit again and when i tried to regain my balance and plant my left foot my left knee gave out i felt a loud pop and a lot of pain and knew pretty immediately that i'd torn my acl i had it confirmed with an mri a few days later and after taking a few days to be upset about my football season ending and to do a little bit of research i decided that having acl reconstruction surgery was right for me and for my goals the anterior cruciate ligament or the acl is one of the main stabilizing ligaments in your knee it helps you maintain a stable knee while running balancing and changing direction but it can only resist so many abnormal forces if your knee moves forward too hard or twists inward strong enough it's possible for the acl to give weight and tear resulting in a loud popping sound so about a week after the injury i started my rehab acl rehab starts almost immediately after an injury most surgeons don't like to operate when the knee is still swollen as there's some research that shows that operating too soon can have negative outcomes on your long-term range of motion so for me personally i opted to have my surgery about three months after the injury doing a really thorough prehab is one of the most important things you can do in preparation for acl surgery for me i did about four to six weeks of really hard strengthening range of motion exercises and a lot of work on a stationary bike to achieve my prehab goals the main four were reducing any swelling in my knee maximizing my range of motion reducing any limping i had and then slowly starting to maximize the strength of my left leg so that it could match my right doing your prehab in preparation for surgery as i said is one of the most important things you can do because not only does it give you the opportunity to start preparing your muscles and your body to minimize the effects of the injury it also gives you a chance to start to mentally prepare for your surgery going into surgery can be a really scary thing i know for me i was really nervous considering it was my first surgery but i took a lot of comfort in knowing that acl surgery is actually a really really common procedure it involves taking out the damaged acl and replacing it with a piece of muscle tendon for me they used a piece of my hamstring tendon but there are other procedures that use patellar tendon quadriceps tendon and even donor grafts coming out of surgery the first three days were probably the most difficult for me i know sort of the morning after at about 3 a.m when the painkillers wore off i realized just how effective they've been at that point and for the next two days it kind of felt like my leg was ignoring me when i was telling it to move if i tried to get up and walk around the weight of my lower leg on my knee caused a ton of pain and as a result of that i was pretty much stuck in bed for those first two days just doing small range of motion exercises and doing a lot of icing and i was really dependent on my family for basically everything i needed to be doing at the time those first two days were some of the most mentally confronting for me because you know looking ahead to the prospect of being able to do something like run again is really hard when something like rolling over in bed feels as difficult as it did at the time that all started to get easier by probably about day four at that point i was walking around pretty much on my own using my crutches and felt like i kind of had a little bit of that independence back by about two weeks i was off my crutches entirely and within a month i was able to move around the way i needed to i was cycling i was able to walk up and down stairs one step at a time and i only really had pain when i was doing some of my more difficult exercises at that point took me to about the six week mark before i was back in the gym consistently back at work and by that point i was only feeling really sore swollen towards the end of a really long day on my feet it's pretty normal for people to start feeling usually really good in that two to four month mark and start to really look to kick their rehab into next year but coincidentally that also happens to be the time when the acl is at its weakest between that 6 to 12 week mark and that's one of the highest times for risk of retail by about five months after the surgery i felt stronger than i had beforehand and like i was moving quite well i had a little bit of restriction in my knee as far as going into a full bend but otherwise i didn't feel like i had any problems at that point my biggest issue was more of a mental block around reintroducing some new movements things like jumping and twisting and landing were all a little bit scary just because i hadn't done them in so long and i wasn't sure how my knee was going to respond to something like that being reintroduced beyond that not being able to play sports was probably the hardest part of it i'd always kind of pictured myself as an athlete so coming into this it almost felt like a piece of my identity was missing along with this huge chunk of my social life and i know that i really felt the impacts of that on my mental health especially as i got towards the later stages of my rehab when things were feeling quite good but i knew i wasn't quite ready to get back to it current research says that you need to take at least nine months after surgery before getting back into sports but it's important to recognize that it isn't just about the passage of time and letting your body heal most of the current research suggests using criteria based protocols which basically presents a patient with a checklist of the things that they need to be able to do before they can graduate into the next stage of their rehab this allows you to respect to shoot healing times but most importantly make sure that the rehab is individualized to that person and they're able to achieve the things that they need to achieve before they go back into sports i know my acl tear was a big education in just how individualized that needs to be i know before the injury i'd treat patients who'd come in and they were walking without crutches the day after surgery and they progressed a lot faster than i did and that was very frustrating at the time but it really did emphasize just how individual that process needs to be and the fact that every person is going to recover from this differently and your rehab needs to fit into your life and needs to fit with your goals [Music]

Channel: Kinetic Labs

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Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021