ACL Surgery

Hi friends,

Just underwent ACL reconstruction on my left knee. Just wanted to understand anything I must be aware of during the recovery period. Any personal experiences is most welcome and much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

As long as you can form an O with your dominant hand and move your hand in an upward/downward motion you should be good.

Sup brah. I had ACL surgery maybe 15 years ago when I was a kid. I did a ton of sports back then. To be honest, I don’t think I ever got back to 100% and I consider that was the end of doing sports competitively for me. However, I don’t have any pain until today and was still able to run marathon, triathlon and fun stuff like that. Other people might have rehabilitated more successfully if they were more committed to sports. Good luck and hopefully, you get a cute girl physio.

First ACL replacement (left) in 1993: tae kwon do. Rehab was about 2 months.

Second ACL replacement (right) in 1995: tae kwon do. Rehab was about 2 months.

Third ACL replacement (right) in 2012: slipping on gravel. Rehab was about 2 months.

First total knee replacement (left) in 2015. Rehab was about 3 months

Second total knee replacement (right) in 2017. Rehab was about 3 months, though I still don’t quite have 100% flexibility 11 months in.

Scheduled for second total knee replacement (left) in 2055, more or less.

You sound like the much more realistic and less exciting 6 million dollar man. Got any more tendons left?

My knees hurt now.

no worries brah - derrick rose is killing it this season after several years of ACL and meniscal reconstructions. stay focused on rehab but stay patient with the recovery process - most people reinjure cause they try to speed up

  1. don’t rush things

  2. do your rehab exactly as directed and don’t skip or slack off

  3. Rehab / workout hardcore once you get the all clear

Friends of mine who’ve had ACLs and weren’t training competitively afterwards never fully recovered. You have to stay on the workouts for the long term. There’s a reason it’s a ~9M recovery for competitive athletes.

2 months niiiiiiiiiiiice that elite level recovery

Kobe just injected horse painkillers in his knees and dropped 40 on the Knicks the next day.

My ACL replacements were all cadaver grafts (allografts), not autografts (i.e., using one’s own body parts for the graft, such as using part of one’s own patellar tendon or, as I understand it these days, part of one’s hamstring tendon). The typical recovery time for an autograft ACL repair is much longer than for an allograft repair because there are two surgical sites that need to heal, instead of only one. Furthermore, there is a strong tendency to develop tendonitis where the graft was removed (which is why I opted for the allograft).

After my first ACL replacement I was in physical therapy in NW New Jersey. No matter the exercise they gave me to do, I did twice as much: if they said do 10 reps, I did 20; if they said do 20 reps, I did 40. There was another gentleman at the therapist’s who had injured his back and was, from all appearances, a typical couch potato. One day he was watching me as I was doing twice my instructed workout, and asked me, “How can you DO that?”

I asked him, “Do you like being here?”

He replied, “No! I hate it! I want to get out of here!”

I said, “So do I.”

The surgeon had said that I would be on crutches for 6 weeks and in physical therapy for 6 months. I was off the crutches in 2 weeks, and after 2 months the therapist told me to leave. “There’s nothing more we can do for you.”

They had this incredibly fancy machine on which you could do leg lifts and leg curls and so on, and it had sensors all over it and would give you a printout of things like force versus time. According to that machine, after 2 months my injured leg was stronger than my good leg in every test they gave me. Finally, in an effort to find at least one test in which my good leg was better than my injured leg, they had me do a fatigue test: trying to do a leg extension against an immovable bar, which recorded the force vs. time. That was the one test in which my good leg outperformed my injured leg.

Thanks a lot all of you! Just will stick to what the Physio/Surgeon says and overdo only what he asks me to (as magician said).

@Ohai - if I can come and run back a Half marathon without pain in some 6 months, that’s all I need. I am not a super sports guy, just want to keep myself active and I enjoy running (by American standards, my running would be a fast walk or at best a jog).

Cheers!