- Identifying my injury -
This blog is about the process of identifying my type of injury after the football accident.
Hospital Visit
After the incident, I cooled down my knee in the dressing room and waited for my teammates to finish the match. At first, I thought I just hurt my knee and that there was nothing special about it and that icing and rest will do the trick. So I didn’t call my parents because one of my teammates would bring me home. When the match ended, my team came in happy because they won, but one teammate looked worried. He told me about the dangers of knee injuries, and he said it was smart to go to the hospital. I didn’t want to be a burden for my teammate, so I told him to bring me home, and I would go to the hospital with my parents.
After coming home, my father gave me the famous football sponge treatment. This treatment normally enables football players like Neymar, Robben and Sterling to recover within one minute of a broken leg injury after being slightly hit in the penalty area by a defender. Most of the time, it is because they dived themselves. However, my father’s sponge treatment didn’t do the trick, so we knew that it was more than only a painful knee.
I went to the hospital to check my leg. The nurse asked me the following questions: Can you move it, what happened, how much does it hurt, and where does it hurt—the answers I gave were very quick: No, football injury, a lot and my knee. The nurse felt my knee, and she thought it was a strain. She suggested icing and rest, and I would recover within a few weeks. The nurse gave me a tight panty and some crutches. The nurse suggested that I go to a physiotherapist once the fluids were out of my knee. At this moment, my knee was bigger than the hump of Quasimondo.
Remembering the pop sound I heard when rupturing my ACL, I felt it was more than this, so I decided to go directly to a physiotherapist. I didn’t want to wait for the fluids to go away out of my knee. I wanted to know what was wrong with my knee and why I wasn’t able to stand and walk.
ACL Physiotherapist visit
Two days after the injury, I had a meeting with the physiotherapist from my village. I told him the story, and he immediately started talking about the ACL in general. He found out that he could push my under leg further from the upper leg than the other leg. The physiotherapist had a suspicion that it was my ACL, and he asked his colleague if he could take a second look. This physiotherapist also had the suspicion, and they told me that I should go to a hospital or a specialist clinic to get an MRI scan to check if their suspicion was correct. I asked them about the ACL, and they told me about the stuff I couldn’t do without surgery and the possible road which would lay ahead of me. As you could imagine, this news was something I didn’t hope about, and it was the first time I knew that this injury would take a lot of time and effort to be my old self.
My physiotherapist told me that if I ruptured my ACL, I should look for a different physio with more experience and better facilities for my rehabilitation process. I just moved cities, so going to a new physiotherapist was already my plan. Changing on such short notice, on the other hand, was not part of my plan.
Orthopaedic surgeon visit
I went to Bergmans Clinic instead of the hospital because the hospital was too busy, and Bergmans clinic reviews were very positive. They also could help me right away. After one look of the Orthopaedic surgeon, he told me that I ruptured my ACL and that he would plan an MRI scan. He told me that it was nice that I was so proactive and quick with getting to them because most of the time, people who have ruptured their ACL will take a break for a long time because they think the pain will go away. So it was nice that I was so quick. However, because there was still a lot of moisture in my knees, they couldn’t perform the MRI scan. As a result, he recommends several exercises and that I would meet with my new Physiotherapist to get rid of the moisture in my knees. I had to do several exercises three times a day which cost a lot of energy, time and effort. The rest of the day, I needed to rest and ice my leg. For some good exercises, please check the exercises blog, which will be posted after this blog.
I wasn’t able to do the simplest things, such as moving my leg, lifting my leg, stretching my leg or bending my leg. However, after doing the exercises every day, I saw some results slowly. Eventually, most of the moisture in my leg went away, and I could plan my MRI scan.
MRI Scan
Doing the MRI scan was, unfortunately, not something new for me. Few months before my injury, I had to bring my Grandmother to a lot of MRI scans. To go inside the MRI scan was something new for me. I was not looking forward to it since an MRI scan day is not similar to a day to the beach. I had my scan one month after my injury, and I already made amends that I ruptured my ACL. The MRI scan experience is something that I will not forget since my MRI scan got stuck for a half hour. I was stuck in the MRI for a while. The noise from an MRI scan is similar to the noise made by construction workers when planting the big poles in the ground. To hear this for 45 minutes so close by was not a pleasant experience.
Dealing with rupturing my ACL
A week after the MRI scan, I had a meeting with my surgeon to check my scan. This scan confirmed the suspicions and my worst nightmare. I ruptured my ACL, and I had some cuts in my meniscus. I took this possible news into account before the meeting. However, when hearing this news, I cried. I cried because I knew that this Injury would influence the rest of my life, and if not dealing with it probably there would be a chance that I could never play football again. During the meeting with my surgeon, we discussed the possible options and the consequences of these options. The options were: going for surgery or do nothing. When doing nothing, you need to create a lot of muscle before you can walk again. The surgeon also told me that by doing nothing, I wasn’t able to do a lot of things, and my whole life would change.
The surgeon asked me the following question, which helped me a lot when deciding on my next step: What do I want to do later.
I answered the following: In the future, I want to be able to play football with friends, go on hikes and experience the world without thinking about if I can do something with my bad knee. But the main thing that I would want is to be able to play without any restrictions with my future children.
The surgeon understood me and told me that surgery was the best option. Nevertheless, no matter what I would do in the future, I will have to train my knee a lot and think about what my knee could handle.
I decided to go for the Surgery and to make my rehabilitation process my first priority to make sure that I could do everything I want in the future
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