Tore Everything but One

by Jasmine
(Colorado Springs, CO, USA)

Hi everyone, my name is Jasmine, 20 years old and have been a competitive athlete my entire life in numerous sports. The funny thing is I was just practicing parkour/freerunning with my friends, gearing up for a production, not competing. I was relatively new at freerunning but had experience with gymnastics, tumbling, dance and karate that I felt I would be fine So I was practicing a new move called a kong. A move where you sprint towards on obstacle and leap off the ground, extending ones body straight out into the air, placing ones hands on the obstacle and flinging ones feet under and straight out through your arms. Now I was having difficulty due to the fact that I have longer legs than torso and arms so I was swinging my legs out to the left. My last run I did the same thing but landed with much more force than before because I had sprinted faster this last time in order to try and use momentum to get my legs through, unfortunately it didn't work as planned. I landed sideways and all that force was applied to my planted right foot that had landed first. I hear and feel things pop, my femur popping and sliding on both sides of my tibia and I promptly fell over lol. Through a series of tests it was discovered that I had a DISLOCATED PATELLA (KNEECAP), TORN MCL, ACL, AND PCL, TORN LATERAL AND MEDIAL MENISCUS, DEEP BONE BRUISES OF THE TIBIA AND FEMUR AND FRACTURED PATELLA AND CONDYLES OF THE FEMUR. I basically had ripped and popped everything there was to do so except the LCL lol. So now I've been in physical therapy for a couple of months as my knee is still swollen 3 months later and have a patellar tendon graft surgery coming up during spring break. I dream about and look forward to being able to jog again and I don't even like to run all that much lol. Well good luck to everyone out there with an ACL injury, be good to your physical therapists and I pray everything will work out well for you. God bless!