3 days post F3. Fun run with my ladies at one of my running clubs. Nice and easy 3 miles planned. Could only complete 1. The agony in my knee, my right knee, my good knee, the one that had started during the F3, came back with a vengeance! I stopped running and tried to walk back to the running shop from which we had started. Limping and in constant pain the entire way. Took me almost 30 minutes to walk a mile. It was terrible. I knew, in that instant, that there was something horribly wrong. I had done more damage than I had realized. At the same time, my left knee had started developing an odd "click" when I went into full extension. It wasn't particularly painful, but it didn't feel great either. I had already been through physical therapy for the clicking, to no avail, so I figured more PT was on the agenda.
MRI and PT, MRI and PT, MRI and PT. I'm not really sure how many times I repeated this process. 2? 3? Who can even say? The insurance companies, but man screw those guys. Regardless, nothing was helping and at this point, I was a surgical nurse specializing in orthopedics. I knew I needed something more. Finally saw a surgeon who agreed to do bilateral knee arthroscopes to diagnose and treat any problems. I had already missed an entire season of training. No 2014 Chicago Triathlon. No 2014 Big 10K. No biking or running at all. And even swimming kind of bothered my stupid, stupid knees. Enough.
September 26th, 2014. The day of reckoning. Or surgery. Either one of those things. I knew was ACL reconstruction felt like and I was anxious. Luckily, this was so much easier. SO much easier. I was up and walking out of the hospital without crutches. Magical! Turns out, I had a large osteophyte on the posterior surface of my patella on my left knee. Possibly a condition called heterotopic ossification (where bone forms in soft tissue), but probably not. It's pretty rare in autografts in ACL reconstructions. So I'm just a freak! In the right knee, literally nothing wrong. Couldn't find anything, so they "irrigated copiously." Sure, sounds great docs.
I had been on the road to recovery once before, and completed some pretty badass things. I was ready to tackle this one in the same way. A half Ironman distance had been on my radar before the injury, and as long as I could start running again, I was going to complete one!
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