Nothing comes easy

Tomorrow I will be at 7 weeks post-op from my latest reconstruction surgery. Time has gone by fast but still it feels like I ran forever ago.. 7 weeks in a lifetime is a pretty short period of time, but with this injury it is a long, long time.

Nothing with the recovery comes easy; not your first steps in walking, not your first steps in running, not gaining back your range of motion or all the muscles lost in the quad and calf. Why is it so damn hard then? Everything you were so used to doing before your injury seems so hard to attain now, and everything you were able to do back then seems almost impossible to achieve right now. What to do when it feels like your hard work doesn't seem

to pay off; it is so frustrating at times. The physical pain is pretty big, but the mental pain is probably much bigger actually. Lots of thoughts coming and going, thoughts of getting fat, of not being able to fully go back to an active life, of not being able to run or walk normally again, of somebody hitting your knee by accident on the street, of you not being able to handle the recovery road, that something will go wrong... Small thoughts that together make a scary, unpleasant, obnoxious and sometimes discouraging totality. It is very hard to deal with all the emotions you're going through and at the same time try to live a "normal" life at the same time with family and friends. 

The first couple of weeks are mostly bed rest. It really depends on the people but you don't really move much with a full-casted or full-braced leg that has been cut open. The leg must stay elevated almost at all times, it must be iced to get the swelling down, you can't move it. The swelling is pretty bad in the beginning, you don't recognize your leg but you see a giant soccer ball as your knee; yes that's right, it does look pretty abnormal and ugly :D The brace itself is heavy and big and takes a lot of place. Not the nicest outfit but it's not like there is too much of a choice. 

The following weeks involve your first appointments in physiotherapy. At first there's not much you can do. Lifting your leg with your own weight, and...yeah that's pretty much it! I could start bending it just a little later after having mobilized the leg for a little while. The importance of a good physio and a motivating physio is HUGE. Your physio becomes almost like your best friend and you spend a lot of time doing the exercises he/she has given to you. Check-ups with the doctor are also important so that he/she can assure the recovery has started well and the knee feels good. I saw my physio last week and I thought all would be well, my ROM is now about 80 degrees, but he said he is concerned that the ligaments have been put too tight and my knee might lock out to that ROM in the worst scenario. Of course I wasn't quite expecting that but now he put in my mind the idea of a new surgery next spring to repair the ligaments and the things attaching them....I'll have a new check-up in January but for now it doesn't look too promising :( 

I've come to a stage in recovery where my physio has given me the permission to start aqua jogging with a belt. It has been feeling so good, it makes my knee move too and water is a great way to rehabilitate those muscles and ligaments in the knee. I'm hoping to get back on a stationary bike pretty soon after the New Year, but if my knee refuses to bend then that will have to wait. 

Running and being able to do little jumps, kicking a ball, swimming normally and skiing still seem to be very very far away but I keep my head high. There is a lot of reasons I could put my head down and give up, but why would I do that? Why would I sacrifice all the work I've done to quit now, at this point? So no, I don't have the intention to quit. Ever. That's not even a possibility. I have started something I want to finish. I want to get better, I want to get my knee functional again. I want to get my active life back and for that I have to work hard, look at the possibilities rather than the missed opportunities. I have missed out on so many things. I miss the feeling of belonging to a team whether it was for soccer or track&field, I miss it. There's nothing I can do about it, being part of a team is so much than just sharing a similar passion. It's having friends, having fun together, getting so unforgettable memories. 

       

I haven't been able to do the three sports I love the most for years now (soccer, track&field, downhill skiing) and I still have tears running down my cheeks once in a while. For a long time, I hated myself for doing that, crying. But I have understood that it is strength to cry sometimes and it just shows how much you truly love something. I haven't had it easy but I know some have it way harder than me. So every day I think about how lucky I am to still be able to do the things I am able to do now, and how lucky I will be if I get to do the things I love at some point in the future. I don't think that nothing worth fighting for comes easy. You need to hit a few bumps on the road in order to be able to achieve the highs. If it's just flat all the way, then what could you achieve? Maybe I won't be able to those exact same sports ever again, but it doesn't hurt to try. Giving up and not trying hurts more, I know it does. And if it really comes down to not being able to do those things again, the worlds is full of new opportunities and new things to discover. Eyes open and mind positive anything is possible. 

Slow progress is better than no progress: how to deal with this injury

After some painful hours of waiting I was rushed to the nearest hospital to get my knee on its place. I The ambulance ride was a real nightmare, morphine didn't suffice and even though my head was all messed up I could feel the excruciating pain in my lower body and every bump the ambulance hit dislocated my knee more. Finally at the hospital I was put under anesthesia and I woke up 45 minutes later with my knee back straight again. I had been crying a lot, I was angry that it happened to me, I was angry at myself for not having done something differently on the field, I didn't really know what to think.

Pain is the most annoying feeling in the world, the feeling when you are hurt but nothing you do helps to get rid of it. This injury contains a lot of pain, whether it is physical or mental and often they both come at the same time which makes dealing with it even harder.
When my first injury occurred January 2013, I didn't even know that kind of pain existed. You go from feeling good and powerful to someone crying on the with the slightest movements hurting and wishing you were dead instead. I told that to my dad once and he said he'll remember me saying "at that moment, when I was lying on the football field, I wished I was dead" for the rest his life. It might sound funny to wish for death but during those long hours I waited for the ambulance to come ans take me to the nearest hospital every breath I took hurt, my knee was all detached and I was in shock. That was at about 9:30am.























After that procedure I had to be driven back to my home town, we were at 5-hour drive from there so I was on a stretcher and I was put in an ambulance taxi. We arrived at about 10.15pm. At this oint I did not yet know in which condition my knee really was. I thought it had just been badly dislocated, I thought I would come out of it without too much to worry about. What I did not realize was how much that day and that injury would haunt me for the rest of my life, how much my life would change because of what happened.
A day after my injury the doctor came into the room after I had been in an X-ray, an MRI and a CT scan. I saw from his face that something was very wrong and the news broke my heart. I did not expect that one coming at all and despite me trying to be optimistic it felt like the ground I had built my everyday life on, completely collapsed. All the hard work I had done for many years tumbled down in a matter of seconds.

I stayed at the Children's Hospital for a while after which I went back home to wait for my reconstruction surgery. Those two weeks between the injury and the reconstruction surgery are very tough, mentally and physically. You start to go through all that happened, why it all happened, how you have to continue from there, how your every day life has changed. All little things you don't think about when everything is going good. You don't think your life will change suddenly like that. It's very unpredictable. Of course we know sad and regrettable things happen in life but never expect them to happen to us, and when they do, it's a whole new style to adapt to and to accept.

My first reconstruction surgery was done in February 2013. I thought I had endured all the pain possible but I was so wrong...waking up from the surgery the pain was immense, I threw up many times because of how strong all the pain killers were. When the anesthesia drugs started to fade away the pain hit pretty hard. I had prepared myself for the surgery but not enough for the feeling you have after it. I knew surgery was the step in the right direction, but still I could not get over the thought of why I didn't play differently in the game a couple of weeks back. Hospital life is mentally hard, you see tons of sick people around you and it doesn't ease your pain at all. In my case, I was in a room full of middle-aged ladies who complained about everybody and everything they could. It made me want to be stronger than that, I wanted to tough it up better. I got my leg put in a cast a couple of days after the surgery. That too, was something I didn't really expect. They had to start bending my knee to the right kind of angles, which was very painful.

I had strong antibiotics, pain medication and nutrition given intravenously for a while. I didn't eat much at all during my stay at the hospital and that is why I was pretty weak when I finally got to go back home. Because of an increased risk of embolism I have had to learn how to stab myself to the stomach with an injection.

Since the day I got home my life has included many hours spent with physiotherapists, lots of hospital and doctor visits, plenty of self-employed workouts and exercises done. A lot of tears, many bad days, a lot of rewarding moments, a lot of sweat and calories burnt at the gym and doing rehab. My knee has looked ugly, it has been swollen, it's been bleeding, it has had nasty bruises, pretty much everything. This injury definitely changes your life. You have to learn how to cope with your new reality, how to deal with the issues differently, how to change the way you exercise, the way you treat your body. With a knee like this we have to learn to recognize the pain, we have to be willing to slow down a little bit sometimes and push harder when the knee feels better again. We have to work so hard, endure so much pain in order to obtain a couple of days with no pain. For me this was very hard to accept, very hard to deal with. It was so frustrating when everyone else could run outside and lift weights when I could barely bend my leg 10 degrees. After four weeks with a cast and no weight-bearing or bending the knee at all I got my ACL/PCL-brace. That was a big milestone for me, it feels so insignificant, but at the same time it was something huge: I could start working my way to walking and bending my knee little by little. It wasn't much progress but at least it was something. After 4 months on crutches I was finally able to walk again, and man did it feel good!!


This process is very slow, I wasn't even close to being healed when I injured myself again in November 2014. I was back on crutches for 2 months. The doctors knew the same knee was badly damaged again and it wouldn't be possible to do sports before the surgery. But I was abroad and could not be operated before next summer at least. I was devastated and shocked, how could I go through this again....But I decided almost right away that I would keep my knee in the best shape possible before my next reconstruction (done a year later, November 2015). I started running, swimming, going to the gym, everything I was able to do with the restricted range of motion and limited exercises. My knee felt like almost normal, it kept popping out and would do horrible sounds from time to time but nothing I couldn't handle. When I arrived back home my surgery was booked for the end of August, but I found out in the beginning of September that my surgeon had quit the hospital he was supposed to operate me in. Another setback, just like that...I started to feel like I couldn't handle much delay anymore, my knee started to feel really loose and it popped out more often. We found a new surgeon who told me I basically had nothing supporting my knee anymore. I wasn't quite expecting my knee to be in that bad of a shape but I knew I had worked up muscles around the knee so they were keeping it together. Two days before my reconstruction I ran 57 km with a totally crappy knee. I wanted to run for the last time before the surgery. It might have not been the wisest decision, but you never know what future brings to you. How do I know if I'll ever be able to run again?

Every little bit of progress is better than no progress. Hold on to that, never quit. Together we are stronger! Even though life may have totally changed due to this injury, there's always a way to figure things out, there's always something you can do, there's always something good even in the darkest days. I have decided that I do not need this to be easy, but I need it to be possible; it drives me to keep pushing even on the days I do not see any progress because I know that one day I will see what I have accomplished.

The rehab process: Expectations vs. Reality

After my newest reconstruction done this week (Tuesday 10.11) I've been thinking of what I could write about. I soon made up my mind and decided to write on the rehab process, probably the most important individual thing after an injury like this.
Before my first knee reconstruction done in February 2013, I saw my surgeon. I knew I had completely tore my ACL, PCL and MCLs and all my tendons and nerves had been injured. Even though I had the verdict clearly on paper like that, what did it actually mean? What kind of recovery would it require? When my doctor told me I'd be out between 8-12 months, I was SHOCKED. It felt like my life was torn apart, I cried and cried and wanted to be alone. At that moment it felt like forever, but now I can honestly say that wouldn't have been that long. A year goes by this fast..just clapping your fingers. I would've done so much to have that 8-12 months of recovery time. 




EXPECTATIONS:
I had never heard of ACL-injuries before mine happened, I had no idea what it would be like. And I mean it, literally, no idea! I thought the rehab process would be nice and easy following your pt's advice and exercises to strengthen your muscles. I thought every day would be better than the previous one and after the surgery there would be no pain. I thought the rehab process would've gone straight forward and that my knee would feel normal at the very latest after those 12 months, but how wrong was I when I thought that.....

REALITY:
Recovering from a multiligament injury is so much more than 12 months, it's so much more than doing only the exercises your pt gives you, and it's anything but nice and easy.
Since I'm only 3 days post op on my newest multiligament surgery I'm gonna tell about my previous surgery and its rehab process. I saw my physio for a total of 36 times, I worked out on my own time, after school, with my pt, pushed hard to get back to normal everyday life, which hasn´'t really come true.


After my surgery I had a full length cast from my toes to my hip for five weeks. Leg strengthening exercises had to be started right after the surgery and I found myself lifting my leg in the cast 4 times a day for 20 minutes at a time. Wasn't much of an exercise, but it was something - it was a start. Following the cast I had a full-length brace in my leg for 4 months, that wasn't my life's highlight moment either, but at that time I also started seeing my physio and it brought a new perspective to my rehab process - I had set to myself a goal I wanted to attain, be back to the sports I love! I wish it would've been that easy, but the rehab sure isn't a fairy tale. All the pain meds, the ice packs and a smile that covers the pain are everyday life during recovery.


Seven months after my injury, in August 2013 I had to go through a new surgery, my screws had detached and they were going through my tibia bone and my femural muscle. The pain after that was pretty big, and due to the surgery I lost again the muscle I had regained since the surgery. My rehab contained a lot of bad days in exchange to a couple of good days. It was very frustrating at times but every little improvement and development in my range of motion or amount of muscle was rewarding, and that's what kept me pushing hard.
The mental part of the recovery is probably even harder than the physical one. Lots of bad days, lots of tears, lots of days when it feels like all the work you've done has been worthless. It's very much like a rollercoaster ride with some ups but a lot of downs too. On those bad and painful days we gotta keep remembering ourselves that everything we do is worth it, is gonna pay off at the end, because otherwise those days will bring us too down.

Always remember to keep your heads hell high and stay strong!!

The first

I've been thinking about writing a blog like this for a long time, but have never really got into it. But better later than never, and I think it's a good time to start it now.

Who am I?

I'm an 18-year-old high school girl from Finland, very passionate about all kinds of sports. I have played soccer, floorball, hockey, I have done track&field, I've swum, and done trampoline jumping..so pretty much tried everything ;)

What's this blog about?

This blog will mostly concentrate on my rehabilitation journey from a bad knee injury. I don't do this to get any pity or sorries, but to give everyone with this injury hope and stength, and hopefully some ideas for their own rehabs too. I want to share my experience and show that with passion and motivation and hard work anything is possible. Great things never came being in the comfort zone. This blog is about dreams, about a long recovery process that takes energy, sweat and tears, it's about a life-long journey that I want to share with other people. 

What happened?

Since this is my first time talking about my injury, I'd better tell what happened from the very beginning. It was January 20th 2013, we were playing a tournament in a small town in Central Finland; it was a cold Sunday morning and we were on our last five minutes of the game. I went to pick up a high ball from our side of the field and two girls from the opponent team were following me. We all jumped to get the ball and then, next thing I remember was lying on the field screaming like a crazy person. One of the girls was on my leg and I managed to push her off of me. I remember looking at my leg and then screaming more. Nobody really realized what was going on, then two adults from our team came to my side and they immediately saw something was really really wrong...

The pain was immense, something so unbearable that I wish I could've been dead instead. I saw my leg just hanging on the side, my knee cap being behind my knee. Two medical ladies came and asked me if I was okay - "seriously ladies just go away", I thought. I kept screaming and crying at the same time, everything was blurry and I couldn't really picture anyone around me.

The game was interrupted, and we waited for the ambulance to come for over an hour and a half, when they finally came they kept moving me from one stretcher to another and everything my knee hurt more, there was nothing to support it and it felt like my knee was completely detached. I was taken to the biggest hospital in Central Finland, and in anesthesia they my knee cap back on its place. When I woken up the doctor told me it was very close that my circulation hadn't stopped, the knee had been dislocated for so long.

After that I was put into an ambulance taxi and after a 5-hour drive I was in the biggest Children's Hospital in Southern Finland. I was so tired that I just wanted to go home, but unfortunately that was not the case. I stayed there for a week for numerous tests and examinations and imagings. MRI report was pretty devastating: ACL, PCL and MCL totally ruptured with major tendon and nerve damages as well. I got to go home for a week to wait for the swelling to go down a little bit so that the knee could be operated. Then a new hospital visit was made, this time for the surgery. I had my knee reconstruction surgery done February 6th 2013. I woke up in a terrible pain, I thought it would be over after the surgery but it was at least as bad as when the injury happened. I had a full leg cast for a month and a full leg brace for 4 months. My doctor said I should not take going back to sports for granted anymore, running could be over for me; but this I didn't want to believe. I did homeschooling for 6 weeks, it was way easier with all the pain medication and cast going on.
This was only the beginning of a long road which I'm going to tell about in my next blog text.