"NFL Players Sustain This Injury"

August 2006

It's 4 vs. 1. Four say there is a hip injury and 1 says there is not. I tried researching doctors and only found one in Colorado. I lived in Illinois; that's a problem. Not having any success, my dad called the "super-specialist" to see if he knew of any other doctor in the area. He told my dad that he already had his "expert" opinion, but if he really felt it was necessary, he could bring me to see Dr. K who worked at a different well known Chicago hospital. The best decision I made was seeing Dr. K at the end of August 2006. I have been with Dr. K over 6 years now.

My nerves were through the roof the day I saw Dr. K. I didn't have good luck with doctors in the past and I didn't want him to be like the others. I had to bring all of my records starting with my ankle so he could see all that had been injured from this fall. When he walked into the room he introduced himself and was very nice. He then said something that threw me for a loop. He said, "How HARD did you fall? Your MRI shows that you fractured your calcaneus (heel bone)." WHAT?!? Back with the ankle injury I was told there were no broken bones; this explained why I couldn't walk on my heel. I told Dr. K that I landed VERY HARD. He proceeded to tell me, he could see that. When he put my films up, he pointed to the bottom LEFT of the MRI; not the top right like the previous doctor and said, "So, how is the super-specialist?" dripping with sarcasm. "You DO have a detached posterior acetabular (ass-a-tab-u-lar) labrum. NFL players sustain this injury when they land trying to catch a football." When he examined my hip he was able to move it in ways that aren't normal. When I was standing and put all my weight on my right leg, my hip was subluxating (partial dislocation) out the back. He said surgery is needed in order to correct the problem. The first surgery date that was open, was September 21, 2006. Exactly 1 year from the initial fall.



My niece Emily can still make anyone happy when they're having a bad day

My niece Lizzy is still my little sidekick.

September 2006

I missed a week and a half of school. Surgery consisted of tightening the capsule in the hip and putting 2 anchors in the back to reattach the labrum to the bone. There isn't any type of bracing or casting that is used; just the use of crutches for 6 weeks. Recovery was difficult because anytime you go to sit or stand, your hip joint has to move. You don't realize how many times you bend your hip in a day: using the bathroom, taking a shower, getting in/out of the car, using stairs, getting comfortable in bed. It sounds so basic, but getting comfortable in bed was one of the hardest things to do; no matter what you do, you end up having to move your hip. I watched a lot of movies and worked on a lot of homework. When I went back to school, I started having a lot of shoulder/scapular (shoulder blade) pain. I remember coming home from school the one day and telling my mom I felt like I was slouching. She noticed it and said try to sit up straight. I couldn't. There was a lot of pain over both shoulder blades. I didn't want to use a wheelchair so I continued using the crutches. Little did I know, this was one of the first major signs that I had a shoulder injury. Before I could even think about my shoulders though, I had to focus on rehabbing my hip. I started physical therapy 5 weeks out from surgery. As I got better and therapy progressed, I was thrown for a double major loop. My right knee that had already been operated on was "giving way" and my left hip was shifting out of place as well.

November 2006

When I saw Dr. K, instead of him saying "this is impossible" or "you're making it up", he told me I had to once again go for MRI testing. The MRI arthrogram of my left hip showed I had a torn labrum (cartilage) which probably happened from having to support myself on the crutches for so long. The knee MRI appeared normal but when Dr. K examined it, my patella (knee cap) was now shifting towards the center of the body this time. Both my hip and knee would require surgery. It was decided that I should have the right knee done first because I would need at least one stable leg to stand on because I would be on crutches after the left hip surgery. Up until surgery on my right knee in December 2006, I had to always use crutches because I had an unstable joint on each leg. The crutches continued to make my shoulder blades hurt more and more. I eventually changed the way I was crutching by rolling my shoulders forward to get the weight of the backpack to sit differently. This relieved the pain and pressure so I continued doing it; I now know that was the worst thing I could have ever done.

Knee before being fixed

Knee after being fixed. Notice the patella doesn't move in anymore

Luckily with the knee surgery, I had it done over winter break so I did not miss any school. I was on crutches for 4 weeks and began physical therapy once again. Therapy went great. Since I was progressing, and wasn't having issues with my right leg, I was able to schedule my left hip surgery for in March 2007. In February, my shoulder blade pain was getting hard to tolerate. I played the cello in school and would have to stop playing and rest my left arm on the "shoulder" of the cello because it hurt so badly. This whole injury thing was taking a lot longer than I could have ever imagined. I started coming to terms that I was never going to play competitive soccer ever again. This was very hard to wrap my brain around. I needed a new outlet for stress relief so I started to take my drawing class more serious. I started doing more drawing for fun and not because I had it for homework. Drawing provided stress relief and it was something that I had complete control over.

Frog done with colored pencil in 2007

Tiger done with just pencil in 2007

March 2007

When it came time to have the left hip surgery in March I was dreading it. My shoulder blades were screaming at this point and I couldn't bear the thought of having to go back on crutches for the next few weeks. Luckily though, there ended up not being a labral tear in my hip. Instead, it was strictly a very loose capsule issue that needed to be tightened. At my 1 week post-op appointment, I remember Dr. K asking how I was feeling. I was completely honest. I told him I felt awful and everything was hurting. My knee, my hips, and most of all my shoulders were hurting. That day I learned, I needed to be careful expressing how I was feeling. Rather than acknowledge the fact that I had just had 5 surgeries this past year and was still healing, Dr. K said, "Sometimes pain medications alter ones' mood." He then proceeded to ask if I was depressed which I was not. I acknowledged that depression can cause many symptoms but that was not the cause of my pain. My hips and knee hurt due to surgery and my shoulders hurt because I thought they were injured. I then asked Dr. K, "If I don't use the crutches, will I damage the repair in my left hip?" He said, "No, but most people use them for a couple weeks." With the reassurance that I wouldn't harm anything that had just been corrected in my hip, when I got home I put the crutches against a wall and never went on them again. I would rather hurt every time I took a step in my hip rather than experience the sharp, stabbing, awful pain I had in my shoulder blades from having to support my body weight on crutches. I will never be able to go on crutches the rest of my life due to the extensive shoulder issues that were soon to follow.

I Doubt You Injured Your Knee...Wrong!



2006

My knee, my knee, my knee. The nurse thinks I'm confused. She tells me that I had ankle surgery, not knee surgery. I tell her I know that, but right now I have no feeling in my ankle and my knee is killing me. She pushes pain medication into my IV and tries to make me comfortable. As the nerve block wore off on my ankle that day, so did the pain in my knee. The pain in my ankle was excruciating, therefore masking the pain I had in my knee. It was not an easy night in the hospital. As if hurting from the surgery wasn't enough, I had a bad reaction to the general anesthesia making it very hard to breathe. I developed strider. Every breath was short and raspy. My oxygen intake was low. I had on an oxygen mask and it wasn't working. The nurses had to give me a shot of epinephrine which caused my heart rate to go insanely high. It felt like my heart was going to beat right out of my chest. Luckily, the one shot of epinephrine opened up my airway, and I was able to breathe normal again. To this day, I never want another shot of epinephrine.

Before I left the hospital the next day, I told the nursing staff the top of my foot was burning. I was told the dressing was probably wrapped too tight. So before I left, the dressing was loosened. For the next week, I watched a lot of movies, worked on homework and tried to recover. The top of my foot was still burning. As my mom usually does, she takes things into her own hands when she thinks something is not right; so, she called my family doctor. He prescribed me antibiotics just in case I had an infection. Good thing! The next day when I saw the surgeon, he took the dressing off to assess my ankle and to his surprise, the top of my foot was infected. I had cellulitis; a type of bacterial infection on the skin. Luckily we caught it early, and I was only on antibiotics for 7-10 days (I have a scar from that darn infection). For the next 6 weeks, I was on crutches and in a cast.




The reality of everything I have been through the past 5 months sinking in

Come the beginning of April, I was transferred into a walking boot and was allowed to slowly get off of the crutches. I was sick of being on crutches and lugging my backpack around, so I was thrilled to hear this news. I was so happy to be heading in the right direction. Things were finally looking up for me. I was progressing in physical therapy and everyone is confident that fall is a realistic goal to set to return to soccer.  


Attempting to play soccer while on crutches

Life sure did look a lot different for me than your average 16 year old. I basically lived at physical therapy and doctors offices. I couldn't drive because the damage was on my right leg. I relied on my parents tremendously. I learned that even though I was injured and didn't feel well, life still goes on. There are still homework assignments, projects, tests, and quizzes that I am responsible for that need to be done. Being injured and needing surgery is not an excuse to disengage from life. At the end of the day, I am the one who has to be responsible and get my assignments turned in on time. Even from missing a lot of class, my grades got better because I made it my "job" since I wasn't able to hold a regular job. It was extremely hard, but I needed to feel like I had some sense of control in my life. I also needed that sense of control because things didn't look up good for long.

As physical therapy progressed, and we tried putting the crutches to the side to work on weight bearing exercises such as walking, squats, balancing on one leg etc. all of a sudden the knee pain I had when I woke up from surgery returned. I thought to myself, this couldn't possibly be happening. I've had enough of being injured; all I want is to get back to "normal". Since my right knee kept swelling by the end of every pt appointment, my physical therapist advised I go back to my orthopedic and have my knee evaluated. So off to the doctor. Again.

I saw my orthopedic a couple weeks later. My ankle was doing great. Yay! However, when I told him I was having sharp pains in my knee, my doctor didn't think it was at all possible to have injured it. He kept trying to tell me that my knee was hurting probably because of my ankle. I wasn't buying this reason. He then went on to imply, I was saying my knee hurt in order to get pain medication from him. Are you kidding me?!? Pain med seeking?? For one, I had medication leftover from my ankle and two, I feel awful on pain medication. Why in the world would I make something up to get medicine I don't feel good on? It was the farthest thing from the truth. Since I wouldn't drop the issue, and kept being persistent that there was something more going on, he told me to see his associate who specializes in knees and dismissed me from his care.

When I went with my mom to see the knee specialist, he initially didn't think there was a problem. I told him I wasn't able to walk without using at least one crutch. I would swell after any exercise, and something was in the joint causing my knee to lock. He decides to order an MRI. Well, would you imagine that. The results showed there was reason for my symptoms. This means back to the operating room for surgery. My patella (knee cap) was being pulled out to the side because the tissue was too tight so the doctor performed a lateral release. There was also an enlarged plica (swollen tissue) that was getting caught in the joint which caused my knee to lock, so that was removed. Luckily, this surgery wasn't nearly as invasive as my ankle. As one could imagine, when I ran into my ankle doctor at the office after knee surgery, I gave him an uncomfortable stare right into his eyes and he put his head down and walked into a room without even saying a word to me. I think his ego dropped a few points that day because he knows he was wrong. Anyways, I wore a knee immobilizer for 2 week but began physical therapy 3 days after surgery. Physical therapy absolutely sucked that soon after surgery. I worked really hard and was off of crutches by the end of June. Success.

I didn't know it then, but the "impossible" medical journey had begun. As I continued going to PT, I found I couldn't do all of the exercises due to sharp pain in the back of my right hip. It turns out when I landed from that jump back in September, I damaged my right ankle, right knee, and right hip all at once. Since I wasn't allowed to put any weight on my ankle for so long I never knew I injured anything else until physical therapy started. It was now only a matter of time before going to the orthopedic to figure out what was wrong with my hip. Now the real fun was to begin because the injuries that were soon to be discovered were certainly rare and bizarre.