It was about a year and a half ago that something went wrong with my knee. I was training for an indoor triathlon, and had just finished a bike/run combination, when I noticed a sharp pain on the inside of my left knee. I thought at first that it was just one of those myriad aches and pains that pester runners all the time, and assumed that it would just go away. But it didn't. A visit to the doctor resulted in several weeks of physical therapy which eventually caused the symptoms to subside. Or maybe they just subsided by themselves, but in any event the knee felt, if not 100%, at least much improved, to the extent that I ran the Chicago Distance Classic (20K), and the Heritage Corridor race (25K), and the Chicago Marathon (lots of K). But then, around the beginning of March, the symptoms began to reappear. This time, the orthopedic surgeon got involved, MRIs were taken, and the diagnosis was a torn medial meniscus. This is a shock absorber type of thing, made of cartilage, which cushions the femur from the tibia (I think). The MRI also showed a torn anterior cruciate ligament, which would have been much more serious. However, the doctor, after much tugging and twisting of the knee, didn't think it was that bad ("Does that hurt? I thought it would, but how about this?"). The treatment was arthroscopic surgery to repair the meniscus, plus a warning to the effect that there were also indications of arthritis, and if that was indeed the case, tough luck.
The surgery itself was a breeze, in and out of what can only be described as a surgical factory within three hours. Three small incisions were made in the knee, one to inject fluid that would expand the knee and make more room to work, another to do the necessary cutting and trimming, and a third to take pictures of it all from the inside. Those are the pictures that you see here.
The top two show the frayed ends of the torn meniscus which was a possible cause of the problem. The next two pictures show the meniscus after the frayed bits had been cut away and everything tidied up. It looks a lot better and with any luck will enable me to get back to normal running. However, as seen in the next picture, there is indeed some arthritis (described by the doctor as "mild") as evidenced by the dimpling effect in the cartilage covering the femur.
The remaining pictures show a normal ACL, normal lateral meniscus, and normal patella.
The surgery was done on June 23. I started biking and swimming again nine days later without any ill effects. I tried running, very slowly on an inside track, after eleven days and that was a mistake. I didn't run again for three weeks. Now I'm up to 6 mile runs, still pretty slow (9 _ minute miles), and I've managed a 10 miler, which wasn't a lot of fun. But all in all, I think that things are improving, although it will clearly take a while before the knee is 100% better.
The lesson is, I think, that a lot of running is hard on the body and eventually something will break down. The good news is that with modern surgical techniques we can be up and going again in a relatively short length of time. As John Jerome, writing in The Runners Log, puts it, running makes us go orthopedic, but not running makes us go systemic. Would you rather be hurt or sick?
Richard Page
Return to Argonne Running Club Home page