As I seemed to have found a source of knee pain that has not been discussed here previously (search returns zero) I thought I’d post my story in case anyone in the future is facing the same issues.
Summer of 2014 I was playing around with my nieces and nephews in my uncle’s back yard. It had rained that morning but had cleared up. I was chasing one of them when my feet slipped, then caught, twisting my right knee. It wasn’t excruciating pain, but that was the end of my running around that day. Up to that point I was running 4-5x per week, about 20-25 miles total. I was also biking 1-2x and swimming 1x per week. Not training for anything but not sitting on the couch either.
The knee swelled and the pain didn’t really go away. I stopped running entirely, thinking I just needed a week off of it. Well that turned to several months. I finally went to an ortho in October 2014 who took an xray, drained the knee and gave me a cortisone shot. The shot helped, I was able to return to running for a while. By February 2015 it was swollen and painful again. Had an MRI in April 2015 which revealed nothing. He actually said my knee was an “A” structurally.
In the end I had 4 cortisone shots, had it drained about 8 times, PT twice and was referred to a rheumatologist, who found nothing. Finally, the ortho decided to scope it to see what was going on. That was last Thursday. By that time walking was painful, descending stairs was worse, I had a severely limited range of motion, couldn’t extend my knee fully and it clicked and popped when I did move it. Good times.
As it turned out I have synovial chondromatosis. The doctor removed “hundreds” of nodules from my knee. I spoke to him afterwards for a couple of minutes but I was still out of it. My follow up is next Wednesday so I’ll get some more information including how badly damaged, if at all, my knee is because of those things floating around in there for so long.
As of now I’m doing pretty well. It was painful to walk on Thursday after the surgery but by the time I got up to pee in the middle of the night it was a lot better. I probably over did it on Friday by going to the park with my kids and out to lunch, but oh well. I’ve been on advil only since Saturday and really I’m taking it more for the swelling than the pain. I was back at work on Monday.
I really want to run again. I’m hoping that’s not too far out but I’m not going to rush anything. There’s is so little information online about Synovial Chondromatosis. As soon as my range of motion has increased to the point where I can ride my bike I’m going to sit on the trainer and get it moving. I’ll start PT again soon and now that the things are out of my knee that will actually do some good.
Thanks for listening, just wanted to get some info out on the Internet for people in the future going through this.