Slight back story - I seriously injured both my knees last year after moving. I had moved most of my stuff in small loads all week long preparing to move the big stuff at the end of the week. Well I was at work September 7th, when I did what could be the stupidest way to injury yourself. I had walked away from my desk, realized I had the wrong paper, and twisted around to look at my desk behind me. BUT, because I'm Gumby, I did it while my feet were still facing forward, and my legs were locked... backwards. I can hyper extend all my joints and surprisingly that's also my saving grace. I'll explain here in a sec. When I did that both my knees let out this LOUD "crack crack" and at first it hurt for a split sec, then subsided and I went on about my day. 20 minutes later they were hurting, 2 hours later I could barely walk, the next day I went to the doctor's where they promptly put me on crutches and to "take it easy." A year later I find out that if I had never gotten someone to take a look at this (on a fluke I might add) that a couple years down the road I would be having double knee replacement surgery to replace my worn down, and by then arthritic, joints - and I'm 27 years old.
See below a picture of a normal knee (pict courtesy of http://www.bjc-houston.com/):
Now see a pict (photoshopped to match what I saw in the doctor's office today) of my knee:
My bones are literally twisted and resting on each other a "notch" to the right. Ouch right? Except it doesn't hurt like it should be hurting. It only hurts when I walk up stairs, but not down stairs (well bad anyway), and will go "out of place" when I walk long distances, like at the mall. So what these x-rays show is that the top bone is twisted out of place - which is where the crack I mentioned above came from. It was the bone jumping out of place. So why did it slowly start to hurt? Because I have what's called hypermobility, instead of twisting like I did and tearing my miniscus like a normal person, being in sudden awful pain, and getting immediate help, instead my bones just twisted.... and stayed that way, my muscles became inflamed slowly, just as if I had pulled my arm throwing a baseball. I suddenly stretched out the muscles that control my knee when it was in place by popping out of place, and then later on the inflamation got bad enough that it became unconfortable and stayed that way ever since. The same thing that allowed that injury to happen, extreme flexibility, also allowed me to keep moving with the injury.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I don't know that I would've believed it. In a regular persओं their muscles (specifically the miniscus) would've just torn and that would've बीन it - surgery, or in my case double surgery. But because I can bend like I do, I just get to have someone push them back in place a couple times a week for a few weeks until they stay that way.
Each time I go in Dr. Rowan (who's very nice btw - the whole staff is), will push my knee back to alignment and it'll come back out naturally, but not all the way. The next time it'll go back in and come back out a little less, and then so on and so on. Meanwhile we'll be training the muscles around my knees to hold the bones correctly so once it's realigned, everything goes back the way it was pre-injury. And because the bones will no longer be rubbing each other, the inflamation in my knees will FINALLY go away - which means Old Man Winter won't be causing me so much pain anymore. :) I like this answer because it doesn't mean the "rest of my life" or is without end - after 6 weeks I'm free of this. Done. I don't have to go back - for that at least.
So that's the story!
- Wendy
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