Knee Saga - Part One

I will start this where the official treatment and such starts.  I was in grade 9 (fall 1995) when I first went to my family doctor about my knee hurting.  It felt unstable, weak and significant pain while doing gym.  He sent me to my first orthopedic surgeon (more on him later) Dr. S.  He looked at it, played around with it and diagnosed me with 'chondromalacia patella'. He decided that as a treatment I should be going to physiotherapy for the issue and that is what would help the knee.  I also got a note to get out of gym class for the rest of the semester as the sports we were doing would be too hard on my knee.  I went to physiotherapy for around three months.  After this time it seemed to be better so I was discharged with positive reports from the physiotherapist and the orthopedic surgeon.

Fast forward 4 years later (spring 2000) to the next stop on our knee journey.  I was having the same issues as before so my GP sent me to physio and wrote me a letter for school so I would get an elevator key so I did not have to use the stairs (the school was 3 stories and I had my locker on the second floor, lunchroom on the first and most classes on the first or third floor).  At the end of the year we asked my GP to send me back to Dr. S to look at my knee.   This was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life!  Also, what dad and I remember about the story is nowhere near the same as Dr. S's reports back to my family doctor.

What really happened:

Dad and I went to see Dr. S in July.  He did a physical exam, asked about my symptoms and we talked about the physiotherapy.  He stated that my knees were not tracking (Patellofemoral Syndrome) properly and surgery would probably be likely to get the knee cap to become aligned again in the groove.  He wanted to start me on medications (NSAIDS) for a month and see where we were at.  Well I was heading to my first year of university around the beginning of september so that wasn't really going to work.  Dad asked if there was something else we could try first and then try the medication route if needed in the future.  He agreed to that and went about setting me up for a surgery date for him to perform a lateral release as he felt that would be our only option.  At first he wanted to do both knees simultaniously but with my starting school shortly dad and I felt that that would not be a good idea so we picked my worst knee (the right) to do first and then once it was healed up we would proced with the other knee the following summer.

Surgery was done the first week of August and seemed to go well.  Dr. S mentioned that my knees were very unstable (he could dislocate the knee easily) but that everything went perfectly and I should have no problems.  After about three weeks of physiotherapy I was off to university and ready to go.  However my knee wasn't so happy.  I had to take a few friday's off first semester to go home and get Dr. S to look at my knee.  He kept telling me "Once you can life 'x' pounds in a straight leg raise you will be great".  Well 'x' kept getting bigger with each appointment and I was getting pretty frustrated.  I had to apply at the special needs office at my school to get a parking permit (not handicap yet, just so that I would be able to park on campus and not on the roads surronding it).  Around the end of second semester I went to see him and he decided that he was going to do a cortisone injection in it.  As exams were coming up I asked that we do it at a later date.  I had a week off between exams so I made a special trip home to get the shot.  When I get there however, he decides that he does not want to do a cortisone shot in someone so young (19 at the time) and thinks I should go back into physiotherapy and that we would re-evaluate my knee at the end of the summer. Well, it's kind of hard to go the summer doing something you know won't help only to be told just before going back to school, that another operation may be needed.  That was the last appointment that I ever had with that surgeon about my knee.

What we found out after:

For some reason, it was not until I went to see another orthopedic surgeon, did I even think to look at the reports that Dr. S had wrote up for my GP.  Here are a list of the things that we found out:

• Dad and I 'forced' him into doing surgery before trying conservative therapy
• During surgery they found bone fragments that had to be sent to pathology
• The surgery report stated that another, more involved, tracking surgery would most likely be needed
• After every office visit to him he states that he discharged me from his practice
• Each report stated basically that I was back 'again' complaining about my knee
• I tried to pressure him into giving me a cortisone injection, which he refused based on age
• That I was not following his physiotherapy plan

And a bunch more but those are the ones that really stick in my head the most.  My parents and I (as well as my GP) were very upest about these reports and that basically he saw a hard case and once he tried waving his magic scalpel at my knee and it didn't heal perfectly, that I was doing something wrong to sabatoge it.  We did actually think of a malpractice suit but decided that it just wasn't worth it. I continued doing physio through the summer and then we took the next step in the knee saga.....

(Coming soon)