I had ACL reconstruction ten years ago. It was a soft tissue graft to bone.
The doctor told me it would be a year before I was 100%. He was right, while I was on it much much sooner than that, it really wasn’t 100% until right around that 1 year mark.
I just had ACL reconstruction on the other knee. This was a bone to bone graft and my doctor tells me that its likely that I will be 100% in 4 months.
Is this disparity due to relative enhancing properties of that ten year span or is it simply the difference in soft tissue to bone vs bone to bone?
Not in the medical field but like you I’ve had knee surgeries on both knees. I tore my patella tendon in my right knee in 2001 (May) and I didn’t truly recover until after the New Year. Recently (Jan) i tore my patella tendon in my left knee and it seems that my recovery is going to be 3-5 months sooner. During my recent surgery my surgeon took my blood and ran it through a centrifuge and re-inserted it into the knee post surgery for a quicker recovery. Tiger Woods ironically enough had the same procedure done during his knee and achilles issue end of last year. If you had this procedure done then perhaps that might account for the speedier recovery, I know that it’s certainly made a difference in mine.
Bone heals much faster and more completely (in healthy individuals) than, say, muscle; tendon and ligament attachments heal slowly, and rarely (if ever) completely.
I had arthroscopic surgery on my right knee in 1980 (the first such surgery in that hospital). I had to be hospitalized for three days, then it took a long-ass time to heal. And I wasn’t even diabetic then.
I’ll be having similar surgery in the fall, on both knees. From what I’ve heard I’ll be an outpatient, and the only thing slowing down the recovery will be my diabetes.
Bottom line: Ask your doctor and physical therapist (you do have a physical therapist, right? Because if you’re not doing the right therapy, you won’t ever be 100%, let alone in four months. Not that you can’t do the exercises on your own most of the time, but you need someone to check in with, make sure you’re doing them properly, etc. ).
I wonder if it’s a slight misunderstanding about what your surgeon meant. The ACL reconstruction rehab protocol posted on the MGH sports medicine site is still pretty close to what I had five years ago (nine months for full-contact, if everything goes perfectly. Which it never has in my case).