Operations
Oh, I'm sorry, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. I've not even told you why I'm writing this yet. I've just had an operation on my knee, which I injured playing for the mighty Union Street FC back in March 2006. If you're interested in these things, I ruptured the ACL in my left knee winning a header against some chopsy-larrakin called Ramsey, and it took me all of 8 months to get an operation on the NHS.
The operation is really clever (or just plain horrific, depending on how squeamish you feel about these things). Your ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is a ligament right in the middle of your knee that connects your tibia to your femur (look at me getting all technical) and stops your leg from shooting off in front of you. I ruptured that, which means that it isn't there any more (in the past 6 months I've learned the oh-so-important difference between a rupture and a tear).
You can play sport without an ACL - apparently my all-time Swindon Town hero, former Scotland midfielder and current Notts Forest manager Colin Calderwood kept playing after he ruptured it. It's just a question of building up the muscles around your knee (I imagine Colin had lovely thighs). But my consultant told me that if I want to play football - which is just about the nastiest thing you can do to your knees (just ask Martin Scarfe) - then an operation was the only way to go. Maybe he didn't like my thighs.
The ACL can't repair itself, so they (they being the clever doctors) need to graft (tear off) a bit of ligament from somewhere else. Sounds fun, huh? They could take a bit from the ligament that attaches your patella (knee cap) to your leg. Mmmm, nice. Or they could take a bit of your hamstring (there's plenty to spare apparently) - which was what they did with me.
So, the operation goes a little something like this: drug the patient til his eyes pop and make some quite neat little holes in the front of his leg. Somehow take a strip of his hamstring (apparently they test its strength mid-op on a ligament-strength-testing machine - images of giggling surgeons pinging ligaments around the operating theatre abound) and screw it into place using dissolvable screws (hopefully they're not made of sugar, or I'm farked). Stitch patient up, stick a worryingly-large tube in his thigh to drain the blood from the knee, and laugh when patient wakes up from his anaesthetic - babbling like a drunkard to everyone in the ward.
Ta-da!
The operation is really clever (or just plain horrific, depending on how squeamish you feel about these things). Your ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is a ligament right in the middle of your knee that connects your tibia to your femur (look at me getting all technical) and stops your leg from shooting off in front of you. I ruptured that, which means that it isn't there any more (in the past 6 months I've learned the oh-so-important difference between a rupture and a tear).
You can play sport without an ACL - apparently my all-time Swindon Town hero, former Scotland midfielder and current Notts Forest manager Colin Calderwood kept playing after he ruptured it. It's just a question of building up the muscles around your knee (I imagine Colin had lovely thighs). But my consultant told me that if I want to play football - which is just about the nastiest thing you can do to your knees (just ask Martin Scarfe) - then an operation was the only way to go. Maybe he didn't like my thighs.
The ACL can't repair itself, so they (they being the clever doctors) need to graft (tear off) a bit of ligament from somewhere else. Sounds fun, huh? They could take a bit from the ligament that attaches your patella (knee cap) to your leg. Mmmm, nice. Or they could take a bit of your hamstring (there's plenty to spare apparently) - which was what they did with me.
So, the operation goes a little something like this: drug the patient til his eyes pop and make some quite neat little holes in the front of his leg. Somehow take a strip of his hamstring (apparently they test its strength mid-op on a ligament-strength-testing machine - images of giggling surgeons pinging ligaments around the operating theatre abound) and screw it into place using dissolvable screws (hopefully they're not made of sugar, or I'm farked). Stitch patient up, stick a worryingly-large tube in his thigh to drain the blood from the knee, and laugh when patient wakes up from his anaesthetic - babbling like a drunkard to everyone in the ward.
Ta-da!
Labels: ACL reconstruction, Hospitals, knee, Operation, surgery
posted by Badger at 11:21 PM
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