Knee Recovery?

[mike]

Ok.. I am just curious here. The coach of the women's basketball team here at school asked myself and a couple friends to come in and play with the womens team. We've been doing that since the season started in November and it has been fun. One of the girls though had knee problems and over christmas break, ~Dec. 23 she had a knee surgery on her right knee where according to the trainer, her knee cap was being pulled to the right by a lateral muscle so they went in and cut it to release the tension. Now this girl is back in practice already and this seems quite odd to me. Granted she has been rehabilitating for the last 3 weeks but it seems pretty fast. The girl really wants to play and is pushing herself hard. I'm just curious if this seems like an extremely quick turn-around for such a surgery as she will be playing in 2 weeks. The trainer here at school says she's fine and has the girl running up and down the floor with us. I am not planning on contradicting the trainer but it seems pretty quick and I was curious if anyone had any experience in this kind of matter.

mike

mike

[TA Baracus]

It depends on the person, really. I had the same surgery (retinacular lateral release) on both knees, and each one was different. The surgery on my left knee took about 6 weeks before I was back to normal and worked great. The right knee, however, was a different story. That knee still isn't back to normal, and I limped for over 3 months. If she is a top-shape athlete, then her recovery with proper rehabilitiation can go by pretty quickly.

[Bill Hartman]

Travis is correct...it does depend on the person and the situation.

Realize that competitive athletes have a totally different mindset than your typical individual (I'm sure you know what I mean).

To give you an idea, I've had a football player do surgery on Saturday morning and play the following Friday night.

I also had an electrician that had bilateral meniscectomies and went back to work in 4 days with full ROM and Zero swelling...I was shocked. I asked him if it still hurt...his response was, "yeh, but I've hurt worse". He then showed me where he grabbed a hot wire with his hand which permanently deformed a couple fingers (and probably scrambled his brain).

Bill

[bryanc]

Just as a sidebar, that reminded me of this cool anecdote from one of the sport med physicians here on the rodeo sport med team (I'm in Calgary, what did you expect?) who was examining a rodeo competitor for a concussion. As part of the standard medical history, the physician asked, "Have you had any prior injuries?" to which the cowboy said, "No." The physician then had the cowboy take off his shirt to do a full physical and pointed at a scar on the cowboy's torso, "What's that scar from?"
"Oh, that's from when they had to take out my spleen when I was gored by a bull."
"And..what's _this_ scar from?"
"Oh, right, that's when they had to take out part of my liver when I was thrown from the bull."
"And...this scar?"
"Yeah, that's when they had to open my chest because they didn't know what was going on inside when I got stomped on by a bull."

Those cowboys scare the crap outta me. One of my athletic therapist friends had to attend to a cowboy who had been gored by a bull (this doesn't happen often, but the stories accumulate over time) who said, in response to, "How are you doing?" (mostly to maintain conscioussness), "It smarts a bit...ma'am."

Anyways, back to your regularly scheduled thread on knee recovery. Motivation and pre-surgical fitness/health are big factors in return-to-play decisions, but also realize that for most competitive athletes, they also have very vigilant monitoring resources (trainers, physicians, therapists) that accompany the seemingly "quick" return to play.