Purpose of This Blog
I'm a long-time runner with a recent focus on ultramarathons, who is about to undergo OATS/mosaicplasty surgery and meniscectomy to repair an injured right knee. I'm hoping my recovery and rehab goes well enough for my eventual return to running...perhaps even to ultramarathoning if that turns out to be possible.
My Purpose for Blogging This Experience...
I'm blogging to share my experiences with others who may be making a decision about cartilage surgery or are also recovering/rehabbing from knee cartilage surgery. There are many studies and reviews of short, medium, and long-term outcomes from the various knee cartilage surgeries (including microfracture, OATs, mosaicplasty, ACI, allografts, etc.), but few details are available for endurance athletes trying to return to their sport at something at least close to pre-surgery level.
After my right knee injury worsened (in late 2018/early 2019) to the point where it was greatly impacting my training, my orthopedist suggested microfracture surgery as a possibility for fixing a full-thickness cartilage defect on the lateral trochlea. I opted to try physical therapy first, but began investigating the impact of microfracture surgery on running. I did find some very useful blogs and forum threads about running after microfracture surgery. I'm trying to do the same here for OATs/mosaicplasty. I want to share my decisions, reasoning, successes, and failures during the rehab and return-to-running process, so that others may have at least one more data point to help with their own decisions.
Please feel free to ask questions and to share your experiences. I'm going to post more details on the injuries that led to this surgery and my decision to undergo mosaicplasty in the days and weeks ahead (before my rehab really gets going...I'm scheduled for surgery tomorrow!).
I had my surgery today after arriving at the facility at 5:45 AM this morning. I feel better than expected so far...after a low dose of oxycodone in the recovery room about 9:45 AM, I haven't had to take any pain meds for over 10 hours now. The doctor did not prescribe total non-weightbearing...he is allowing "toe-touch" pressure (about 20% of body weight) right from the start. I haven't spoken to the doctor yet (that should happen tomorrow), so I don't know exactly how the surgery went. From the paperwork I left with, it appears I received one 10 mm allograft from donor bone. This was not part of the plan and suggests that one of the cartilage lesions turned out to be too big to do entirely by mosaicplasty. I'll do a new entry when I find out more, but appears that the scope of this blog may expand a bit.
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that the surgery went according to plan. The donor bone was used to fill the holes where the mosaicplasty autograft plugs were taken.
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