Anyone else ruptured their ACL? Care to share your experiences?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, last winter I went skiing for the first time in my life - a decision which, in retrospect, I’m starting to regret slightly. On day 4 (or 5, I can’t remember - it was December 31) I fell badly and my right knee went up like a balloon. Went to see a doctor, nothing broken, but a recent MRI and visit to a sports surgeon has all but confirmed that I’ve “done my ACL”, as he put it. I’ll have this confirmed this week, and I’ll be discussing treatment options with him, but having done some reading myself, it appears that surgery is really the only option if I want to keep up a relatively active life.

So - anyone here also ruptured / torn your ACL? What did you do? Anything you’d like to have known before you started your treatment? What happened to your knee in the long run?

I know YANAD, and more specifically, YANMD, so I’m not looking for advice, but more sharing of experiences. I’m slightly concerned about this whole thing, so anything you can share will be most gratefully accepted.

2

I tore mine in 1997 or so. Had surgery and have been essentially fine since. There are a few places they will take the donor ligament from, some docs will use the center third of the patellar tendon, some use a portion of the hamstring. I had the second.

Rehab was pretty easy, I spent a lot of time doing PT and riding stationary bikes. The strength is darn close to what it was before. In fact I occasionally forget which knee it is.

The worst thing is the scar/ head of the screw that held the repair in place during healing. That hurts like crap if I knock it the side of the coffee table. But it’s pretty small, that happens once every six months or so. The only other issue I’ve got is when the air pressure fluctuates wildly I get an ache. But I attribute that to getting old.

3

Tore my left ACL in 1997, no surgery, but the knee is a little loose compared to the right because only three ligaments are holding it now. It was excruciatingly painful! Healed in about a month.

4

My husband completely tore his ACL around this time last year. He is very active (back country skiier, competitive cyclist) and is also a fire fighter, so needed to get back to 100%. The surgeon did a hamstring tendon graft around May of last year. He had extensive complications, including serious withdrawals from Tramodol (which I am convinced he was mistakenly overprescribed) and very bad inflammation. He had a second surgery to ensure there was no infection in the bone, and shortly afterwards discovered he was Celiac. Once he eliminated gluten from his diet, the inflammation issues disappeared and he started healing properly.

He did physio two to three times a week, and massage once or twice a month. He also did progressive exercises in our home gym, and trained with his bike on a trainer through the winter. He received clearance from the Fire Department doctor to return to work about three and a half weeks ago. We just got back from our first ski trip of the season (:() yesterday and though he took it pretty easy, we was slightly sore. Probably a mix of the bad knee and just not being in ski shape.

His experience will be completely different then yours obviously. You likely don’t need your knee at 100%, and as some PP’s noted, you can live without your ACL depending on how active you are. I would not recommend *not *getting the repair surgery if you plan to ski again or do any activity that requires stabilization (i.e. running, soccer, hiking, etc.).

5

Tore mine chasing my kitty cat up the stairs for fun. There was a L shaped landing at the top of the stairs , needless to say at the speed I was going I didn’t properly make the landing at the top.

I was offered surgery, but kind of got into it with the surgeon when he told me “You’ll probably need surgery we can do it this afternoon”. Long story short, after he refused to answer my hypothetical if It was himself in this situation.
I declined on the whole gassing me out and slicing me open ordeal . I couldn’t walk for 10 days but eventually healed on its own. No problems as of yet . This was about ten years ago.

6

Doctor told me surgery was not necessary, and I have been active at tennis ever since. I am hardly even aware of it. It must have been a partial tear.

I would never go skiing, ever. It is very dangerous.

7

Tore mine at 40 playing soccer. Couldn’t put any weight on it and needed crutches to get around. Doc said something like 75 percent (or something like that, don’t remember the exact number) will heal themselves. I chose to wait and see. It did heal on its own, but took a long time, and longer, at least a year, to feel confident enough to use it without babying it.

I tore it again ten years later playing hockey, under the exact same circumstances, and that was the end of my athletic endeavours. I still wonder if I should have had the surgery.

8

I partially tore my ACL last May. The doctor opted for rehab over surgery. I’m still rehabbing, but that says a lot more about how consistent I’ve been about exercising it than it does about the efficiency of rehab. The knee is a lot better than it was, but I still have some stability issues, especially when it gets tired.

9

ICL, not ACL. I’m not positive when the first injury occured, probably at age 30 while fooling around while drunk. My leg was sore for a week or two, but I grew up in the old days where you just walked it off. In my early 40s I crouched down while working in the yard and it tore out. Based on the MRI the doctor thought it had deteriorated a lot in the intervening years and didn’t think surgery would be successful. I had also worn down a lot of cartilage on the inside of that knee. I went through physical therapy to strengthen the leg, but I was already developing tissue flaps around the other knee from carrying my weight on that leg over the years. So now I can end up limping a lot from a little too much strain on the kneed without the ICL, and periodic pain in the other knee. It doesn’t take much to cause problems on either side. I recommend getting the surgery, two troublesome knees is no fun and very restricting.

10

Just over 34 years ago my binding didn’t release in time, and I basically wrenched my leg all the way round. I suffered a spiral tear of the ACL, and then ripped it off the bone. To this day, my right knee still looks ‘fat’. My leg doesn’t bend all the way back. There was also nerve damage. For years I couldn’t feel anything on the right side of my lower leg or the top of my foot. I have the feeling back now, but the top of my right great toe is still paralysed (can’t lift it up) and has little feeling on top.

Exactly a year later I destroyed my other knee in a car wreck.

.

11

I blew out my left ACL playing football when I was 24. I had surgery and rehabbed the hell out of it, and it actually ended up stronger than my other knee. A year to the day after surgery, I made it to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

One of the things my surgeon emphasized was what he called “prehab” - the stronger you are going into surgery, the faster you’ll recover coming out of it. I started physical therapy as soon as my knee could handle it, about a month before the surgery. There was an enormous difference between my recovery and the other people at the same PT center.

12

I’ve heard this as well - that post-surgery, the knee is as strong or even stronger than before, so that’s reassuring. How long was the recovery from your surgery?

I’ve been doing some reading, and the general consensus seems to be that because of the very poor blood supply to that region, spontaneous healing is unlikely. I’m going to check this with my doctor, to see if it’s true. Mine has been out of commission for 3 months now, though - and a month of crutches and a leg brace doesn’t seem to have cured it as much as just stabilised it for the moment. I agree about the pain, though - a friend of mine suggested I was over-reacting to get myself taken off the mountain on a snowmobile, and I offered to take her back up there, put her in the same situation and see how happy she was to walk on a torn ACL. There’s no way I could have done it.

This is actually my major worry. I can live without playing basketball or volleyball, but I do like to run and hike, and I used to be a pretty active swing dancer. Letting go of all that would be… tough. I’m pretty ambivalent about skiing after this, so I can live without that too, if I have to. Glad to hear he’s okay!

Data point in favour of no surgery! Do you still chase cats upstairs on the healed knee? :wink:

Preach it, brother. Or sister. Strapping two sticks to your feet and launching yourself off a mountain? It’s not a rational thing to do. However, I was just getting to the point where I could see why people think it’s fun!

Again, this is my part of my concern about the surgery - that if I have it, I should have it now. I’ve also read that the longer it’s left, the greater the risk of complications, and it’s already been three months since my injury.

I’m already doing this - as much non-impact cardio and leg strengthening as I can do without pain. My physio and doctor both strongly encourage me to get the leg as strong as possible before surgery, so I’m taking this seriously. I spent most of January in a leg brace from hip to ankle, and when I took it off I was astounded by how much muscle I’d lost in my quads and hamstrings - my injured leg was almost literally half the size of the intact one.

13

Oh yeah, I forgot about the “pre-hab.” When I first tore it, the knee swelled up quite a bit. Docs said they wanted to wait for the swelling to go down before surgery. As I recall it was about a month and a half. I was on crutches for about a week after the initial injury, then just kind of limping around, going to PT etc.

After surgery, it was maybe two-three weeks on crutches, but also doing PT. I was fully active-playing soccer, etc- about four months after surgery. So roughly six months from injury to recovered.

Definitely research your surgeon. I was fortunate enough to get the team doctor for the San Diego Chargers to do my ACL. Years later I tore an achilles and the doc who did that botched it.

14

Back in 1990 while in the Army I injured my knee and it blew up to the size of a basketball. My great Army doctor told me it was a partial tear and put me on physical therapy. I came back from the injury but I was never the same after that. For instance I lost 2 minutes off my 2 mile run time that I never got back.

Fast forward to 2004 and I’m on deployment with the National Guard when I injury my other knee. The Navy doctor goes in with a scope and sees it is a partial tear and cleans it out. That knee mostly recovers. But while he was making comparisons between the two knees he concludes that I was misdiagnosed and I have no ACL left in my right knee. I’ve been going around with no ACL since 1990. When I retire from the guard I’ll go back to the VA and have things fixed.

Just coincidentally my knee has been killing me for 3 days and I don’t know why.

15

I’ve been playing competitive rec hockey for over 20 years. I’m 43.

3 years ago I wrecked my ACL playing in a tournament. It came as I was really driving hard in a physical confrontation, without any previous indication that something might be wrong.

So I hobbled off the ice, paced back and forth on the bench for a couple shifts hoping it was just a momentary stinger, tried to take another shift and realized the knee was useless.

The knee swelled up really badly, was incredibly stiff and in pain. I saw a sports medicine guy about a week later and he had initially thought it could be a cartilage tear. I stopped playing for 3 weeks, then resumed my 3-games/week schedule. It was a 3 month wait for an MRI.

The MRI revealed that the ACL was “torn”, but the image made it seem more like a frayed rope, hanging together by a thread. The doctor pretty much didn’t even offer to discuss surgery as an option, and advised me to do hamstring strengthening exercises to alleviate the impact of motion on the ACL. He also suggested I get a really good knee brace for when I was playing.

I have remained completely active since the injury. This year I have been playing 4 times a week, plus tournaments. Very rarely I will tweak the ACL just from a quick pivot, or maybe catching a rut in the ice and jamming my knee with a weird torque, but the pain subsides quickly (within hours), and the weakness is also short-lived.

I don’t know for certain, but I think to have ACL reconstruction requires massive rehab, which most people who are not professional athletes simply aren’t suited for.

16

I partially tore mine in 1988 when I was 16. I was playing defensive tackle on our high school football team, and on one play in a scrimmage before the season even started, some dick on the other team planted his helmet and shoulder right on the outside of my left knee.

It did this grotesque buckling thing (as seen on game film) and snapped back into position and while it hurt when it happened, it went away pretty fast and my knee felt really strange- loose.

Went to the ER, got it x-rayed, and set up an appointment with my Dr for Monday a.m. He referred me to the orthopedic surgeon, who did all the usual yank, push and pull tests, and proclaimed that I’d partially torn the ACL, and strained my MCL. A few weeks later, I got the knee scoped to determine the extent of the tear and confirm that I didn’t have any cartilage tears. Apparently the yank, push and pull tests only confirm a tear, but can’t really confirm the extent.

Turns out that it was indeed a incomplete moderate tear- the orthopedic surgeon described the ACL as being like a band of elastic that’ll stretch, but if you stretch it too far, the little rubber bands break and it doesn’t go back to the same as it was, but it’s not completely torn in half either.

He said it wasn’t drastic enough to warrant reconstruction, and that I was clear to play football the following year, at which point I tore the MCL completely and did need it reconstructed.

However, some 26 years later, I still don’t have any problems with the partially torn ACL/reconstructed MCL other than it gets kind of sore when cold fronts come through.

I do know the rehab has changed a LOT since then- my former boss tore his ACL and had it reconstructed, and between the continuous passive motion machine and the physical therapy, he was on crutches for a relatively short time, and walking around in a matter of a month or so with a brace, and without it not long after. Much better than the 9 month rehab explained to me in 1988/1989.

17

The key points have all been stated. Surgery now or it will be more difficult or impossible in the future. Without repair it will have an impact on your good knee. Physical condition before surgery makes a big difference, pro athletes have plenty of success with these operations, for everyone else it’s a rough road to run on.

18

I suggest having a talk with an orthopedic specialist. We can’t possibly recommend what to do.

19

I totally destroyed my left ACL playing volleyball back in 92. My orthopedist (the same guy that rebuilt Orel Hersheiser) examined me for a couple of minutes and basically told me to get used to it. He said surgery was expensive and that from the looks of me the only exercise I got was getting of the couch for another beer, so why pay for something that would just go bad in a few years anyway.

I’ve managed fairly well in the years since. I’m just careful when I push off or pivot on the left leg.

20

I tore my ACL about a year and a half ago. Took a while to get it diagnosed, initial diagnosis was a ligament strain, then took even longer (about 5 months) to see the orthopedic specialist, who decided I did not need surgery. At that point I was still hobbling and using a cane. I was told that was as good as my knee was going to get, surgery wouldn’t make it better and I should get used to it. I almost cried.

I wonder, if because I am a middle aged, slightly pudgy woman with a job in an office, that they just wrote me off as another couch potato. Despite appearances, I am actually active and do a lot of things with my dogs, so being out of commission was really difficult. It’s only in the last few months that I’ve started to feel normal again and don’t feel I need to baby the injured knee anymore. It’s not 100%, but at least it’s functional now.

About 15 years ago I blew out my PCL in a horse riding accident. Had surgery 5 weeks later and was back to working with horses 3 months later. Contrast that with the over a year long recovery from the ACL injury, and yeah, I wish they’d fixed it right away, but I guess from a medical point of view, it’s cheaper to just wait it out and let it heal as much as it’s going to on it’s own.