Knee Scope

The second Christmas Drew has been not working in most of our married life and what do I do but schedule arthroscopic knee surgery for the Friday before Christmas.

I'd had nagging pain whenever I exercised hard for a couple of years.  Way back in 1985-86 I tore my ACL clean out so I've been living life with no ACL, which creates a lot of instability.  I can't count the number of times I have re-injured this knee since then, most recently that big hike I did two years ago Thanksgiving.  An MRI revealed a probable tear in the medial meniscus and potentially the start of a bone spur on the front of the knee.

 Doctor Mark Scholl went in there after it on Dec 18.  Here's what he found.

The piece of tissue to the right of the metal probe is the flap of torn meniscus that had folded underneath the rest of the meniscus.  This medial half of my left knee meniscus is about 1/3 the volume of a healthy meniscus. The good news is that the femur and tibia surfaces (the top and bottom flat white surfaces in the photo) look to be in good shape, i.e. no arthritis.

The video below show the doc trying to maneuver the flap so he can cut it off. There is not sound, but you can click in the lower right of the video to make it full screen.

In this one, he has separated the nickle-sized hunk of meniscus and is pulling it out of the joint.

The bone spur turned out to not be a bone spur, but just an area of damage to the soft tissue that wouldn't heal, so he cut slits in that area to get some healthy inflammation and blood flow to it.  This video shows that area while he is articulating my knee.

Drew was not due home until late that evening so my friend Shelly retrieved me from the hospital.  I had my recovery room all set up the day before so that I could just get kicked to the curb (well, not really, Shelly escorted me into the house and made sure I had everything I needed) to recover until nursemaid Drew came home at 8 pm that night.

I felt pretty good with my kitty nursemaids by my side.

After three days I was putting weight on it but still using crutches.  I was allowed to take the bandages off.  Here are before and after surgery pics. 

Before

3 days post-op. Not too swollen, really.

 My sisters and Mom sent me gorgeous flowers to brighten my bedside.

By the following Wednesday I was able to go to work and not use crutches.  Christmas came and went with a lot of limping, but not much pain.  Then I went to work two days the next week and Kapow! my knee swelled up like a puff ball mushroom and became really painful.  Back to crutches and laying around.  Max and Marley didn't mind that at all, especially in the warm back bedroom.

I brought some work home. I like these office mates.

So today, after nearly a week of being really careful, I was able to walk a little and went to my first PT appointment.  The PT really helped; although the knee is sore, I have a lot more movement in the joint.

I hope to have no more set backs so we can have fun in February.

UPDATE: 3 WEEKS POST OP
Feeling pretty good. PT helps. I'm able to go around a full pedal stroke on the stationary bike.  Still limping a little. No cardio exercise but I'm able to get a decent upper body work out in at the gym.

UPDATE: 4 WEEKS POST OP
Same as last week except that the knee feels less weird and I'm walking almost without a limp now. I can spin easily on the stationary bike and I've done yoga a couple of times.  Still being careful, but I occasionally forget I had the surgery and just do normal things.

UPDATE:  5 WEEKS POST OP
I had a PT appointment at 5 weeks. The very best PT in the valley, Dr. Colin Bywaters (who also helped us coach high school mountain biking) gave me a good session today.  He pushed on the top of the knee to stretch the back of the knee, which helped immensely in being able to straighten almost fully. He then made me lift actual weight by doing leg extensions and curls with 30-40 pounds.  I was afraid the knee would be really sore and swell up, but it didn't. He also gave me the go ahead to do easy cardio, so in the following days I did 20 -30 minutes on the spin bike with some moderate resistance. 

I feel SO much better about the recovery now.  I am walking almost normally most of the time and my knee feels almost strong.  I can go up stairs with no problems; coming down is still odd because I'm at about 100 degrees of bend.  It is still stiff after I have been sitting in one place for a long time, but perhaps that's just the body's way of telling me to get off my butt and move. 

I think I'm gonna live.

UPDATE 6 WEEKS POST OP

Feeling pretty strong, but not 100%. 

UPDATE 7 WEEKS POST OP

Dr Bywaters said I was good to go on vacation. I have full extension and I can flex 127°. The swelling is hard for someone who doesn't know which knee was operated on to tell. Some of the quad muscles are still atrophied and it feels funny going down stairs. I do moderate cardio. I still feel that it is pretty far from being able to ride a hard effort on a real bike, but we are leaving on vacation and I'm going to walk and hike as much as I can!

SE Asia Days 20 & 21 - Hanoi again and again

So chalk it up to poor planning, or as I like to call it "free traveling", but we had another almost two days in Hanoi. That means we would spend a total of about 5 days in this city. My first post about Hanoi was titled "I love Hanoi". This post could be "I tire of Hanoi". I like the city a lot, but we've seen as much of it as we need to for now. For our last two days in Vietnam, we pretty much just caught up on sleep, ate some good street food, at good restaurant food, and took pictures.
After we got off the train at 5:30 a.m., we wandered around for a bit because nothing was open. Finally, Highland Coffee opened.

If this is the"Starbucks of "Vietnam" as the guidebook said, then Starbucks needs to charge more and never clean their bathrooms.

We went to the hotel to see if we could check in early, and I think we were the only guests, so they let us.

We had booked a room at this hotel before our trip to Sapa because of the very cool decor in the lobby and because it was a little nicer than the low budget places we had stayed all along - going out in style we are.

The owner collects antique bicycles and motorcycles, and they had a turtle and koi fish in their pond. Plus rocks! It called to me.

The room was nice too. Very spacious and with a private balcony.

The roof top garden was a lovely place to catch a turtle sunning himself or, as we found out later, to drink a beer.

The view from the rooftop garden was ok.

We didn't do much this day except get caught up on computer stuff and go out to a really fantastic dinner at Namaste Hanoi. Yes, I know it is un-Vietnamese-y to eat Indian food for our last night in Vietnam, but we really wanted something yummy, the restaurant got great reviews, it was close to our hotel, and to be totally honest, we were not in love with Vietnamese food. The food at Nameste Hanoi was better than any Indian restaurant we have in Utah! We sat next to a group of Austrailian expats. They knew Christine, the woman we talked to in Ching Mai who gave us recommendations for HaLong Bay and Sapa. Small world.

We had to fly out at 5 p.m., which gave us plenty of time to have one last look around the city. We went to the Duan Muan market, a traditional market. Mostly, there were a lot of clothes for sale, but the middle was full of herbs

And dried fish. It really smelled.

That took a good hour. Then we stood on a street corner for about 20 minutes and logged all the huge loads being transported by scooter.

This guy was especially crafty; we watched him load up the bike and speed away - nothing tied down, just balancing.

There were lots of big things

And long things

When you are delivering things, you need to call ahead to confirm the delivery address, right?

Good grief!
How many people can a scooter carry? Earlier in the day, we had seen two adults and two children, but this afternoon the max we saw was three adults.

I think the baby in between these two was sleeping.

I will probably have to come back and take a master zen scooter driving course in Hanoi.

After scooter watching, we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake again. There was a cool looking pagoda, but we had only 80,000 VND left, not really even enough to buy lunch, so we didn't buy passage across the big red bridge to the pagoda.

Eventually it was time to catch our flight back to Bangkok. We will have two nights there, and then back to the USA.

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There has been a bit of snow

Around Christmastime we got dumped on.  So much snow!

the sidewalk in front of our street

Deep snow makes snowshoeing fun!

The snow really was thigh deep.

We didn't get very far after the point on the trail where we had to break trail.

My truck was slip sliding around, but Mi Tia was rock solid.

That was a rare January Saturday together.  The next day, some girlfriends had a going away snowshoe for friend Stephanie.

Mary shows that there is a lot of snow.

The uber deep powder was too fluffy to resist doing a backwards swan dive into.

Me, mid-dive!!

Me, immediately post dive.  My head was buried in the snow bank.

Just popping up for air.  I don't ever want to be in an avalanche!  It was so fluffy and deep and I was head down and on my back with snow shoes on, I couldn't really move. Erika had to help me out of the snow bank.

The next snow activity was termed "runking" by Sally. This is where you get to the top of a steep fresh slope and run down it with snowshoes on.

Here is a very short video of Sally "runking"

Erika runking.

We topped off the day with lunch at Porcupine Pub.  Good day - but sad to see Stephanie go.

The snow is fun to play in, but we are ready for a warm adventure.  Stay tuned.