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.