I tore my ACL playing basketball back in November. Unfortunately I made a mistake of waiting 3 weeks before being seen. I was walking without much pain but some buckling, so I assumed it was a bad sprain. But then I noticed swelling wasn’t really going away and ROM is becoming less and less. So I went in and MRI showed torn ACL, a lot of bruising and a sprained MCL. The surgeon at the time had me do 6 weeks of PT since I no longer had extension. I went to PT and they did some work on me, however he was confident that something was blocking my knee and it was painful to bend past 90 degrees. I went to my follow up with my surgeon, he completely disregarded my PT notes that there was something else wrong and said nothing could be blocking it since my meniscus was intact. So he recommend 6 more weeks of PT. After 12 weeks total and no change in extension other than some serious pain and a surgeon who said they wouldn’t do surgery until I had full extension, I decided to get another opinion. My second surgeon took some imaging and agreed my extension wasn’t where it needed to be, but also decided something else was going on. We scheduled surgery and he informed me that PT would have to be brutal post op to get extension back and avoid scar tissue. Surgery happened and turns out there was scar tissue in there. I have better extension now than I did prior to surgery however getting full extension has been difficult. I started PT 3 days post op. I’m still not at full extension and I’m struggling to bend past 70 degrees. My knee feels so stiff and quad activation has been ROUGH, my quad either has a good day or is dead to the world. With not having full extension if this leg for 6 months, I’m feeling really nervous about ever getting back to normal. My PT guy says for where I started my recovery is going great. I’ve had my 2 week follow up and my surgeon is unhappy with my progress, they have a dynasplint rep coming to my house Tuesday and basically said if I’m not showing much progress by my 6 week follow up we will have to consider MUA.
Has anyone had anything similar? And please tell me somewhere between now and 6 weeks something clicked and you saw some insane progress 🥲