On December 10th, I had the first part of the 2 part MACI knee surgery. The goal of this was to remove the broken pieces of cartilage, take a biopsy of my cartilage and grow it in a lab to be implanted a few weeks later.

What actually happened was:
-broken pieces were removed
-biopsy was taken
-bones were cleaned (due to the breakage there were a lot of frays)
–SURPRISE: I had a slight tear in my meniscus
**this wasn’t captured in the MRI and the surgeon saw it while performing my knee arthoscopy. Unfortunately the tear was in a place where there was no blood flow so there was no point in fixing it since it wouldn’t have healed.

This surgery was done via knee arthoscopy, so there was supposed to be minimum scarring since the incisions were less than half an inch on both sides of the knee. While the incisions were not big, the amount of work that was done inside the knee caused it to have a lot of swelling.

Post op – I felt like there was more pain than I had expected. Most people kept telling me that knee arthoscopy was a minimally invasive and easy surgery to recover from, but it was hard for me to move my knee afterwards and the swelling took several weeks to really go down. During this time I consistently did PT twice a week.

The course of treatment started with multi-dimensional patella mobilization (manual movement of the kneecap to keep the fluid in the joint moving). In order to build muscle around the hips we used a ball to do hip raises (less pressure on the knee). As the days went on we started going into straight leg raises and added weight to these straight leg raises. I had to relearn how to use the stairs by alleviating the pressure on my knee which meant that every time I put pressure on my left knee going up the stairs, I would push my knee outwards.

For the next few weeks as we prepared for surgery part 2, we began to build balance and strength. We did knee extensions with exercise bands and the crab walk. It was imperative that I build my hip and quad strength prior to surgery as it would help me immensely with “bouncing back”. By the end of the 6 weeks, I was able to do 50lb kettlebell deadlifts! I hadn’t felt that good in so long but knew that the road to recovery from part 2 was going to be a long one.

Typical session:
Stretch and roll out IT band/quads/glutes
3x 10 one leg step up/down (leading with the injured knee)
3x 15 knee extension with band
3x 10 crab walk with band (each leg)
3x 10 single leg Romanian deadlift with 10-15lbs
3x 10 50lb kettlebell deadlifts

I developed a better understanding of how my body moved and was able to use my hips more in daily activities so that most of the strain wouldn’t be on my knees.

Advice
To prepare for surgery I’d say the best thing to do is to become as strong as you possibly can. The stronger you are going into surgery the faster your recovery. The first surgery is the easy part. The second one will take much longer time to recover and you won’t be able to do the same exercises you once did for at least a month. Your muscles will definitely start to atrophy so it’s important to have a strong foundation before going into the OR.