Background

Hello everyone! My name is Kelly and I am a very active 23 year old. I recently had ACL surgery on August 30, 2011. As I was prepping myself for the surgery, I notice that there was not a great blog or source to find out information from a personal experience online, especially of a female. I am not saying this is going to be the BEST out there, but I wanted to share my personal experience and thoughts with others who are going through this journey.

A little bit about myself...

I played three sports in high school, volleyball, basketball and lacrosse and have always been very active. I graduated from Virginia Tech in the Spring of 2010 and since then I have been going to the gym, training for a marathon, playing beach volleyball, p90x, and so on. Although I cannot pinpoint exactly when I tore the ACL (yes, I know this is very bizzare), I did notice my knee was not right on several occasions. First, I noticed while doing a stretch in p90x that my knee was swollen and couldnt stretch a certain way during one of these exercises. I thought nothing of it, so I continued to do my daily routine. It wasn't until I went white water kayaking that I found my knee was completely messed up. I had zero strength when trying to roll the kayak on my right side, while my left side was completely fine. Since I am right hand dominate, I was supposed to be stronger on my right side.

I knew something had to be up so I went to the doctor and got an MRI. On the MRI it showed that my meniscus was torn. My doctor recommended that I have surgery and that something else might be torn that was not showing up on the MRI.

I scheduled the meniscus surgery for the first week of August.  I got ready, took off work and had the surgery. When I woke up out of the surgery in the recovery room, the doctor said "Everything went well, BUT your ACL is also torn". My mom said I asked "Wait, what?" at least 5 times probably from the anesthesia and the shock. Completely torn by the news (long recovery, intense surgery, more time off work, not being active longer, etc) I began to research ACL surgeries online.  It was tough to find a good and informative personal experience of the surgery so I thought I would document mine to help others out.  So here I go :)

How did you tear your ACL?