About nine months ago I noticed that my right knee began to ache minutes after I got behind the wheel of my car and started to drive. I moved my driver’s seat in every possible direction, but gained no relief until I went to cruise control and was able to move my leg in different directions. The ache only seemed to arrive when my right knee was in a fixed bent position and didn’t bother me during tennis and raquetball.
But about a month ago, the pain came on big time whenever I moved, changed positions and even when I slept. So - off to the orthopod I went, and his diagnosis of a torn meniscus was confirmed by an MRI. The menisci of the knee joint are two pads of cartilage tissue which act to disperse friction in the knee joint between the lower leg and the thigh. One of my “pads’ was partially torn and when inflamed, caused the pain I felt.
So what to do? “Surgery is easy, like clipping a hang nail and leaving the remainder of the meniscus whole,” said my doctor. But he thought I could postpone surgery with physical therapy, an elastic knee brace, a strong anti-inflammatory medication and icing down my knee after activity.
I have never been very good about stretching either before or after exercise, and when my physical therapist, Beth Ann, began to manipulate my leg during the first hour-long diagnostic visit, she remarked that “We have a lot of work to do.” She observed that my right (painful) leg had considerably less movement than my left leg and that the tightness of my tendons and ligaments put more strain on my right knee whenever I twisted and turned on that leg. According to Beth Ann, this was one of the principal reasons for the tear. With proper stretching exercises, I can increase the elasticity of my knee joint and thus put less pressure on the meniscus, lessening the likelihood that will become inflamed.
So I am now committed to thirty minutes of stretching in the early morning and find that my knee pain is gone, and tennis and raquetball are back on my agenda.
Dear fellow Meniscus sufferer -- would you like to form a buddy system. One call in the morning would be just the thing to jolt me to my self inflating pad that I use for all those floor exercises I have abandoned these past 6 months. Such a good reminder. Oh boy, do I remember those mysterious aches driving to NYC! I thought I had phlebitis, and would soon get a deadly heart attack......love you!
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