It's been awhile since I wrote an update. This is mostly because I haven't had any changes in my knee. It's been a year and a half since my surgery and I feel the same as before I had the surgery. I don't feel any relief from my initial symptoms. Fortunately, I'm not in a lot of pain on a daily basis. But I haven't been able to get back into running which is disappointing.
I got an MRI in Oct. Unfortunately I had some trouble getting my surgeon to read it since I had to mail the disk. My surgeon is in San Antonio and I live in New Mexico. The nurse I have been working with gave me the wrong address and it was returned to sender. She has been very difficult to deal with and 50% of the time doesn't respond to my emails or phone calls. Anyway, I finally got my surgeon to look at the MRI. He said everything looked normal with the graft and the "pothole" in my cartilage looked like it had been filled in successfully. So I asked, "why do I feel the same as before the surgery?" His response was, "sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what is causing the pain." I've done some more research on ACI and read several articles in medical journals. I think I have damage to the subchondral bone beneath the cartilage lesion and while ACI filled in the missing cartilage, it did nothing to address the underlying issue with the bone. I've read about procedures in which the damaged bone is replaced with a graft and then ACI is performed on top of the bone graft. It is described as an "ACI sandwich." I don't know why this wasn't ever addressed with my case. Maybe my surgeon was not really experienced with ACI. So I believe my pain is coming from damage to the bone that was never addressed with this procedure.
I don't plan on having any additional surgeries. At some point I'm sure I'll need a knee replacement but after this experience I'm not in a hurry to do anything surgical.
My surgeon did suggest trying PRP (plasma rich platelet) injections. So I will try this in the next week or two. I'm not expecting much from it but it won't hurt to try.
