We managed several day ski trips in addition to our normal ski week in February this year, but alas, I personally only got one day of actual skiing in. How does this happen, one asks?
Chad and I did a day trip to ski in January during the government shutdown while the kid was at school. After doing a few runs, I started thinking about lunch while on a field of wee ice moguls. In other words, the injury happened because I was just not paying attention.
If the bumps had been big instead of wee, I would have *had* to pay attention. If it hadn't been icy, the snow would have been more forgiving. If there weren't any moguls, I wouldn't have needed to pay any attention. As it was, I was thinking "Oh, Chad looks hungry; maybe we should go in for lunch instead of going back to the lift", hit a very hard bump wrong while applying too much force in an unfortunate direction, and felt a disconcerting pop. At that point I hollered and sat down. Apparently I hollered rather loudly, as Chad looked rather alarmed. After a few minutes, I collected myself, got up, and skiied gingerly down to the lodge, all the while thinking it was a good thing that my leg was strong at that point, as the knee felt very wobbly and I was quite conscious of the fact that the only reason I could stay upright was that I was recruiting all possible muscles to stabilize the joint.
We ate lunch, and then I walked down the stairs to the first aid station where the nurse eventually looked at it and told me it'd be stupid to keep skiing if it felt wobbly. Ugh. I guess I sort of knew that, but it was a nice day and I had wanted to keep skiing. At least I was better off than the two other skiers down there that morning -- one guy had a broken collarbone and an older woman had some sort of warming contraption blowing warm air on her because she had injured herself to the point where she couldn't ski and then started to get hypothermic while waiting for the rescue sled. I could still walk, sort of. Chad kindly collected all my stuff, took it out to the truck, and drove the truck up to the back door of the lodge so we could head back home.
By the next morning, the knee hurt quite a bit and still didn't feel stable -- man that wobbly feeling was weird -- so I called Kaiser. I was surprised that they could not only get me in that morning, but after seeing the urgent care doctor, who agreed with my assessment that there was some ligament damage, they sent me straight over to the other facility to get an MRI. With no wait. Quite surprising; I must have hit a Friday afternoon cancellation. I did have to wait until Monday to see the orthopedist, who showed me the images and pointed out that I was really lucky that I had only *partially* torn the lateral collateral ligament and given myself a gigantic bone bruise, so it would heal up on its own if I stayed off of it for a couple of months.
A couple of months? And what does stay off of it mean exactly? I know skiing is out, but how about bicycling? And when I say bicycling, I mean 40 miles up to the top of the ridge and back. Mountain biking? What exactly is a bone bruise anyway? Does it take longer or shorter than the ligament to heal? The orthopedist looked sort of baffled that I was asking these questions. "Just don't do anything dumb." Yeah right. I eventually badgered him into laying out a more explicit framework of what I should and shouldn't do over the course of recovery by telling him to pretend I was a teenager who might not follow instructions unless they were very specific.
5 minutes on the bike on rollers to keep the joint moving. Add 5 minutes more once you get to the point that the first 5 don't make the joint swell up. Booooring. And not enough exercise.
No skiing or hiking for 2 months. Ligament takes at least that long to heal, so does bone bruise. Boo, hiss. (By the way, the bone bruise was really a set of microfractures, so not surprising that it was going to want the normal 8 weeks that it takes bone to heal.) I was at least able to convince the ski area to roll my mostly unused season pass over to next year after providing a note from the doctor.
Chad set up the bike rollers on the back patio so I could do my 5-minutes-at-a-time rides for the interim, and I promptly also went and found an athletic trainer at the climbing gym to figure out what else I could do to stay in shape. I had lots of perfectly good body parts besides my left knee that were still useable, after all. The trainer was definitely helpful over the next several months, both in terms of finding things that I could do in the initial period where most of the healing happened, and also in terms of pushing me to work on parts of me that aren't as strong. (Being mostly a cyclist, all my strength is in my quads...)
A couple of months is a rather vague recovery time. What actually happened is that the wobbliness went away after a couple of weeks, but the joint was still pretty uncomfortable and would swell up if I did much on it until about 8 weeks in. My suspicion is that that was the bone bruise. I found myself doing goofy things like climbing without using my left leg. By 12 weeks, I could do short road rides (30-ish rolling hill miles) and had started to mountain bike. By June, I was starting to hike, but still had to be careful. Somewhere between then and now, it must have finished healing, as I realize I've been back to bushwhacking boulder-strewn canyons, riding hills with stupid 20%+ gradients, backpacking, bikepacking, pushing myself onto harder stuff at the climbing gym, not being afraid of jumping off the slackline, etc. You know, normal stuff...
But wait -- after all that, you still haven't heard about Not-Ski week. Stay tuned for the next post. More pictures and less text, I promise.
No comments:
Post a Comment