Question About Knees
- May 2012
- Hi Steph
Hello Steph
My name is Ryan and I would start off by saying I really love your blog. My fiance would have to get the credit for me following it though because, she has been a fan of yours before me.
I am a newer climber and I have just started to really push myself to climb more this last year. I have been trying to make it to the valley at least once a week, weekend/weekday warrior status. With that said I am still a very much a nooby, just started to lead last year. Most of my climbing was following my better, more experienced partner.
I am totally pumped about the spring but I recently did something to my knee at about. I dont know what I did and the doctor keeps pushing back me getting an MRI. I am totally bummed about this. Thinking the worst. Me and fiance are finally getting our trust in each other and our abilities, then this happens.
I have a question about knee pain/injuries. I have noticed that you wear a knee brace at times, what kind of knee problems have you had?
Do you have any tips on knee pain and climbing?
I work in the medical field taking CT/Xrays so, from what I know I think it’s a meniscus problem.
Do you have any friends with this type of problem?
Basically I am bummed about my knee and want to know if climbing knee injuries can be overcome. I love being outside and climbing even though its only on those hardcore 5.8 LOL.
I hope you respond.
Thank you
Ryan B
Hi Ryan,
It’s been a while since you wrote (I just re-found your letter, sorry!!), so I hope your knee is doing much better. I’ve never had any knee problems, until I tore an ACL (I kept wearing the brace when I jumped for about a year after recovery, because I was worried about re-tearing the graft). Before I finally got my ACL tear diagnosed (it was partially torn for about a year and then completely torn for another 6 months before I went to see a doctor), I was hoping it was anything but that, so I did a little research on other, easier-to-recover-from types of knee injuries. Basically as far as I know, if you have some meniscus damage, they can go in pretty easily and clean it up arthroscopically. This does not take long to recover. If you have hurt an MCL, that’s also fairly fast to recover. If you tear your ACL, you need to get the big surgery. I know lots of people opt for a cadaver graft with an ACL tear, because the recovery time is much faster. But apparently those grafts do not last as long or as well as hamstring grafts. I opted for a double bundle hamstring graft, which is the hardest (slowest) recovery, but gives the most bomber graft. At this point, I can barely tell I had knee surgery, and it was very worth fixing it (especially after a year and a half of favoring a messed up knee).
So I hope you and your fiancee are back to climbing together 🙂
Steph
