Jeremiah's Bachelor Party Disaster

by Jeremiah
(New York City, NY, USA)

Beautiful!

Fellow ACL'ers,

I'm a 31 year old (male) and live in New York - here is my ACL story thus far:

Well, I tore my ACL, partially damaged my MCL, tore my meniscus and bruised the ends of my femur and tibia on a bachelor party night stunt gone horribly awry. Basically, I did a sort of spinning flip over a stair well railing, dropped about 8 feet, and landed really, really wrong (after a solid day of hydrating myself with adult beverages with my buddies).

My ortho. doctor said it was the worst non-near fatal accident he'd seen in 30 years. I think he may have been just trying to make me feel better though. Needless to say, my bride-to-be was very excited when I called from the emergency room!

This took place in July, and luckily I still got married in September. I just had the surgery on December 8th. My surgeon recommended the hamstring graft, and I went with his judgment (even though my Google searches seemed to point towards the Patella graft).

The first few days were just hell - everything was difficult to do. We live in New York City, and walking is such an important part of our lives - we don't even own a car.

I was hoping to be back to work tomorrow, but I don't think that it's realistic. I am having improvements everyday - like today I went outside for the first time since the surgery. I can get 90 degrees of flexion, and I don't seem to have any issue with 0 degree extension.

I'm able to put some weight on it and feel slightly more agile than earlier in the week. Still, my knee is swollen and hurts like hell... I see the doctor again on Wednesday, and I'm hoping that I've made decent progress. I have one of those flex-atron 6000 things that moves your leg back and forth, and I've used that while watching the first and second seasons of Extras. In fact, the flex-o-matic + Extras + coffee + Vicoden isn't a bad way to start the day as far as I'm concerned.

I'm happy to finally have the surgery behind me, and I'm hoping for a speedy recovery. Good luck to all of you out there who are also involved in this crazy process of getting better

Yours in the pain and agony,
Jeremiah