Bringing in the New Year

Well...it happened- another surgery.  Right before the parties got started to usher in the new year, I was hanging out with the medical staff that was getting my leg prepped for another surgery.  Here is the run down of how we got there and what happened.

After the latest diagnosis of having SONK and then finally hearing some positive signs that the SONK was showing signs of reversing, my wife and I decided we needed a break.  So we decided to play the "ignorance is bliss" card for while and just live life the best that we could and not worry about the knee until something happened that caused us to have the necessary conversation.  In plain English, we stopped going to the doctor for a while.

And honestly, that provided a little over a year of fun and manageable activity.  However, this past fall things began to change again.  I flew to India for two weeks and after arriving home, I wanted to spend sometime helping my 4 year old learn to ride her bike.  It only took about two minutes of walking behind her bike holding the seat for my knee to get really angry.  It actually took me out of commission for a couple of days on top of making me very grumpy.  That is when we decided it was time to see the doc again.

During the appointment and routine evaluation it was confirmed that most of my current knee issues are probably a result of my knee cap.  Therefore, it was suggested to perform a chondroplasty to go in and clean up the knee and to see if the knee cap could be helped out at all.  Following the suggestion of our surgeon, we decided to move forward and to schedule surgery for December 31.

What we found is that the ACI surgery took fairly well.  There seemed to be a good amount of new cartilage that had regenerated and still looked healthy.  However, the knee cap was "trashed."  My doctor did his best to clean it up and tried to get it tracking a little better, but honestly time will tell if it is working.  It was mentioned that I might need an artificial knee cap if this surgery doesn't do the trick.  So I have some educating to do when it come to artificial patellas.

As of right now - I am still in recovery mode.  I am walking without assistance but not winning any races. There is still some swelling on the joint along with bruising.  Because of the swelling, it really is too early to tell the final outcome of the surgery.  As the swelling goes down I am hopeful that this will be the last surgery for the near future.  I know there are more surgeries in the future but hopefully further down the road.

I will continue to update the blog with the latest happenings and progress coming out of the this latest procedure.  I appreciate everyone's support and pray for those that are going through similar challenges.

I am Evolving

Just a few days ago I had my follow-up appointment with my doctor.  I wish I had more to say at this point.  The exact wording on the MRI results were that my SONK lesion is "evolving."  Evolving???  What does that mean?

All of a sudden all the jokes of me being the missing link are beginning to make more sense.

Basically, my understanding is that the SONK is changing.  It hasn't gotten progressively worse which is a good thing.  However, before we start dancing through the streets naked...it is still there and by no means hasn't disappeared.  Where do we go from here?  Actually nowhere...yet.  Doc said that he wants me to keep living life as we have for the past 30 days for another six weeks.  At that point he wants to do another MRI to re-evaluate the knee.  I think after the next MRI I will officially be glowing.

Waiting seems to be the word of the moment.  If I am honest, my patience is beginning to wear thin.  I am tired of sitting around, walking with a cane, and living in constant pain.  We are now approaching the two year mark from when things went really bad with the knee.  My wife and I are ready for answers and that seems to be our constant prayer right now.  My doctor really acts like we need to outlast the SONK- so he can move forward with the osteochondral allograft procedure (Bone and Cartilage Transplant).  Which I am not super excited about doing.  I feel like we have looked at and tried the conservative approach and now we are ready to try some "not so conservative" approaches when it comes to the knee...which would be something artificial.

I guess we will know more in 6 weeks.  At least that is what we are hoping for!