Running After Knee Mosaicplasty, OATS, and Meniscectomy

I'm nearly 8 weeks out from surgery now and my progress and recovery really seems to have slowed down. The thrice daily exercise sessions and constant battle against swelling are becoming quite "the grind" at this time. I was prescribed meloxicam for the first 30 days after surgery and that appeared to be doing a great job of keeping my pain down. After withdrawing from meloxicam I started getting migraine-like headaches every other day or so for about 10 days. However, I continued to make progress on my exercises, cycling, and range of motion (ROM) taking the occasional dose of acetaminophen or ibuprofen as necessary. The period from 4 to 6 weeks after surgery I appeared to make some nice progress. I worked my way up to cycling (easily) about 45 minutes per day. I was doing a little bit of walking (just around the house) before each of my 3 daily exercise sessions and worked up to about 10 minutes per walk. Unfortunately, 45 minutes of cycling and 30 minutes of walking p...

The right knee injury that ultimately led to the decision for surgery likely started in 2017 (or earlier). While driving home from my weekly hilly long runs, I experienced sharp pain in my right knee. It made driving home from these workouts (20-35 miles, with as much as 2000 ft. of ascending) very painful, but had no impact on my training. In 2017 and the first half of 2018 I continued to train and race, completing two 100K races, a marathon, and shorter tune-up races. The knee continued to flare up while driving home after long and hilly workouts, but still did not impact training and racing. In the summer of 2018 I began to feel pain in my right knee during downhill running and fast running. After starting a VO2max interval training phase I noticed that my right knee started to malfunction...I just couldn't run fast and it seemed like my right knee wasn't completely responding to commands from my brain. I typically run these intervals at around 6 min/mile pace, but my form s...

Today is (post-surgery) Day 25 and I have made lots of progress despite a few setbacks. A few days before the surgery I rented and picked up a Game Ready ice machine to help get the swelling down the first few weeks after surgery. Pain has not been much of an issue. I take a daily dose of meloxicam, but have not had to take a single dose of rescue medication (oxycodone). There was some dull achy pain particularly during the first week after surgery, but the ice machine was enough to handle that. I left the hospital with a knee brace, which I was supposed to wear for walking and sleeping during the first two weeks. Being a “side sleeper”, I found it very difficult to sleep with the brace on. I adapted a bit, but was glad to jettison the brace after Week 2. Now I am sleeping on my side again, but still sometimes experience a bit of pain that keeps me awake. I put a small pillow between my knees while sleeping on my side to prevent any knee-on-knee violence. I left the hospital with 2 cru...

On Monday, December 7 I underwent surgery to repair three problems with my right knee. The primary lesion (the one that began to impact my running in late 2018) was a full-thickness, 1-cm, chondral defect on the lateral femoral trochlea. (Full description from MRI report: There is impending delamination of cartilage with full-thickness cartilage fissuring as well as linear basilar hyperintensity at the lateral trochlea where there is adjacent intraosseous ganglion cyst formation as well as a severe surrounding stress reaction in the bone.) The injury was repaired with a single osteochondral allograft (donor bone/cartilage). A second issue was a 1.5 x 2.0 cm Stage 3 cartilage defect on the medial condyle (not clear this was causing significant symptoms...see below). This was repaired using 3 osteochondral autografts (my own bone/cartilage from a non-weightbearing donor site (the lateral femoral notch)). The third injury treated was a small horizontal degenerative tear of the media...