Do you like your ligaments?

Ed Spring 2006

Well I hope you do! Have you ever tried moving around unaided by your ligaments and tendons? Well let me tell you it would not be wise to proceed in such a drastic decision. I think you would find out in a rather swift amount of time that your body would be in such an amount of pain that it would only be comparable to that of being trampled by a wild Michelin man.

I used to play a whole lot of basketball, Infact I drank, slept and occasionally in secret ate basketball, I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise activity, but a certain third party had opposite views on the matter. During a certain semi finals the said party being my anterior crutiate ligament had a bit of a laugh and tore itself, the feeling could best be described as being not unlike a swift hit from the side of the leg with an oak tree branch, newly felled from the fields of Rondor. Needless to say this left me in a bit of a fix, a painful fix.

Of course I, not being of medical training did not know that it was a fellow who rejoiced in the name of anterior crutiate ligament knocking at my door, I got back into training and started playing basketball again, and oh what a feelin’, as good as ever. I was out running around the school rugby pitches one fine summers day, and I being young and full of energy thought “hmm here is a four foot green fence thingy, I think I will climb over it”. I proceeded to jump over it and awaited the gentle landing with baited breath, this was going to be fun. Had I been of a more medical persuasion, I would have known that the crutiate ligament when torn, never repairs itself, infact it is the only ligament in the body, apart from its strange partner the posterior crutiate ligament (known by pals as pcl) that cannot heal itself ever. And the knee is actually quite an unstable character, think about it all your wait is balancing on two thin bones held together with…..string. Well what a rather brilliant situation. So as I landed from this obscene height, and carefully considering this information, my knee decided it had had enough, and ripped itself to bits, but properly this time.

Well thanks to the looooovely Irish medical system I was only half a year waiting for the surgery, pays to go private doesn’t it. The surgery is as simple as it is painless, you see the knee has a tendon known as the patellar tendon which attaches the patella (knee cap0 to the tibia, and that friendly gentleman does repair itself. So what one does is to cut away one third of that, cut out he torn bits of the ligament and screw the new tendon into the old position of the ruptured ligament. Simple right? No.

“Edward, EDWARD are you awake, your surgery is over, your are in Mt Carmel hospital, is everything okay”……”ehhhhhh owwwww I’m kinda in pain at the moment, a lot of pain.”….. “oh well we’ll sort that out for you, we have a very strong killer”…… “oh is it an injection”…… “No it’s a suppository, you take it in the bum”……. “Yeh, an injection in the ass, right?” …… “well know it’s a tablet that you take anally, but don’t worry we’ll get some lubricative jelly, it’ll be know problem” …… “Eh, no”. Yeh I kind of decided to just deal with the pain instead. Another complication was that they had cut my knee down the front about 7 inches just under the knee cap and had not stitched, but stapled…. Stapled my skin back together. They kept trying to bend my knee and it felt like one of the staples was about shoot out of my leg and severely disgruntle someone. Perhaps my favourite of all my knee appenditures were the handsomely named“drains” these did exactly what they said on the tin. They drained blood from your knee to bottles, which you had to carry around with you, pretty sweet eh. On the third day in hospital it came to be the exciting time for the drain extraction, they told me that this was going to be “unpleasant”, and again offered me the fabled suppository, ah why would I need that it wont be that bad, the nursed smiled. “you may want to hold onto something”.

She began pulling the clear plastic, McDonald’s straweque hoses from my leg, and amazingly and excruciatingly they somehow went many inches into my leg. The best way to describe it is the reverse of getting stabbed, someone pulling a knife out of you. The pain was…… well I still cant find words for it, I didn’t scream or cry, I was just too shocked at the pain, I really didn’t know you could feel something like that. On mature reflection I really wish I had let them analy sedated me, probed me, whatever just not that.

So in summary the best advice is not to injure your self in the first place, saves a lot of trouble really. And if you do just let them push tablets up your ass. And it wont be as bad as being debbats (stabbed backwards) and hey people put a lot worse up there! You could make a game of it in the hospitals shower “whoops nurse I dropped the soap”).

Ed now lives in a Cube

online since Jan 06

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