Knee Surgery, September 7, 2005

Plica Extraction and exploration of the Knee

Has a story that's ever started with "watch this" ever turned out well.  Not to my knowledge.  So its June 18th and I'm going to ride the Cascade Flying Wheels Summer Century road ride as one of my training rides for RAMROD.  I decide this is a good ride to see how fast I can go.  I run into another rider I know who is really fast and tell him that my goal today is to break my record in riding a century.  He says that sounds cool and we head off.  Well I did break my record by 54 minutes.  I've now paid the price for that feat.  I'm told this is more of a repetitive use injury than a single traumatic injury but after about 75 miles into this ride my knee started to hurt.  Did I listen to my body telling me something was amiss...uh no.  I kept pushing until I got to the final hill climb of the day and had to tell the others to go on without me.  I climbed that final climb with one leg and limped the bike back to Marymoor park.  I suppose if the knee wouldn't have given out I could have taken a full hour off my best century time but that's neither here nor there at this point.  I took a week off the bike after this and tried riding again.  Started hurting after a few miles.  Darn it.  I decided I hated road biking and that must be the reason for the pain so I did a couple mellow mountain bike rides.  That surely didn't help.  So I went to the doctor and got a cortisone injection and took a few more days off the bike.  Tried riding again.  Didn't help at all.  Met with the doc and decided to take 4 weeks off the bike.  Did that and it didn't help what so ever.  So got an MRI and confirmed the doctors suspicion that I had Plica syndrome.  I'd never heard of that.  Did some research and found that I'm a mutant.  Though there seems to be many of us.  Plica is something that we have as infants but goes away in most people as we get older.  In some people we still have it and unless your active you may never know its there.  The doc said it was an easy clean up of the knee so under the scope I went. 

Watch the surgery

The file is 77MB so it may take a while to buffer/download

The surgery took about 20 minutes.  You can watch him completely remove the Plica and then he looks around to see if everything else in there is OK.  Tendons, Cartilage, Ligaments and Meniscus.  He found a little Cartilage damage and shaved it down a bit.

Here are a few pictures of my knee as of September 9th.  A bit swollen and stiff.  Feels like someone took a bicycle pump to my knee and filled it to 40psi.  Looks that way too.  The Vicadin is helping though :-)