Background & Injury

The purpose of this blog is to record the emotional/mental/physical trials and tribulations throughout my journey to recover from MACI knee surgery. These entries serve as a way for me to process my thoughts and heal not only physically but mentally. Hopefully it will also provide some color to someone else who will be embarking on this journey 🙂

Now a little about myself and what happened…
Growing up I’ve always loved to play sports – especially basketball. Throughout my teens, you could always find me after school on the court shooting hoops. It was an escape from the world. Over time, life and responsibilities got in the way, and I stopped going on the court and my life got more sedentary.

I wanted to change that so starting in 2018, I started being more active. I participated in HIIT classes (Switch Playground!) and boxing classes. I had gotten out of my slump and was feeling happier and lighter. I started going back to basketball and ended up joining Zogsports for a bball league in 2018.

Around June 2019 in the middle of one of my Switch classes, I felt some left knee pain when I squatted. I chalked it up to fatigue and bad posture and continued on. The pain didn’t come back so I carried on. A few days later while I was doing another class, my left knee started to bother me a lot to the point where I had to ask the trainer to give me other exercises due to the injury. I still didn’t think much about it and bought a simple knee brace to put on while doing exercises. I started to notice that over the course of two weeks, stairs started to hurt. Boxing started to cause me pain too. But being someone who has had a few surgeries in the past I thought I could overcome the pain and I was waiting for my knee to naturally get better.

In mid July I stepped on the basketball court with a friend of mine and after a couple hours of shooting hoops my knee pain had hit the worst it’s been all summer. I was going to the Balkans in a week and knew that if I didn’t get it checked, I wasn’t sure if I could make it through the trip. The first orthopedic surgeon I went to said that I had a tight IT band which was causing me the knee pain. He gave me a cortisone shot to help relieve the pain and swelling on my trip. I did my best to avoid stairs and brought a hiking stick with me to help me get around. But after a few days, as the steroids were kicking in, I suddenly felt much better.

After coming back from vacation I started going to physical therapy to relieve my IT band tightness. Despite all the PT I did, my knee was still hurting (although less than it did before) and I was not showing any signs of a pain free life. I wanted to get back to what I used to do and it didn’t seem like it was getting any closer.

In November I went to Vegas on a bad knee to a music festival (prob wasn’t a great idea). With all the hype around me, I ended up raging just like everyone else and I remember a specific moment that night when Future was playing and after I landed on my feet I felt a pop in my knee. My knee start cracking and buckling and I endured the next couple days of the festival with a knee brace. The pain wasn’t much worse than what it had been before, but now it felt like my kneecap kept giving way.

After getting back from the festival I decided to find another orthopedic surgeon and that’s where I met Sabrina Strickland from Hospital of Special Surgery. After taking a MRI and X-ray, she said that I had broken off a piece of my cartilage on my kneecap and there were floating pieces around (which explains why my knee kept having the sensation of getting “caught”). I had to have those pieces removed. But the second part was what I was dreading. She said that because the missing cartilage was right where my knee rubbed my thigh bone, it was best if I did a MACI surgery (Matrix-induced autologous chondrocyte implantation) to repair the missing piece of cartilage. So this would involve two surgeries 1) to remove broken cartilage and take a small piece for biopsy to grow in a lab 2) cartilage graft.

Reasons behind why I decided to get MACI:
-25 years old
-Want to go back to boxing/HIIT/baksetball and competitive sports
-Didn’t want a knee replacement at the age of 40
-Algorithmic trader by trade so it was a sedentary job that I knew I could work from home in the beginning of recovery
-Recovery would take up most of winter which was ideal due to NY weather

And just like that, I scheduled my first surgery for December 10, 2019