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.