New Year, New Knee?

This picture shows the bruising, this is pre-surgery

This is post surgery, obviously, and shows the 21 staples, pain pump and drain, and all the doctor's doodles on his knee!

Justin wanted to document Dr. Kimball's sewing skills. The drain is sewn in nice and tight!

So it's a well known fact that Justin has a few broken body parts, past and present :) Well, last month he was bringing in the garbage can from the curb when he hit a patch of ice and slipped just enough to fall and dislocate his knee. He is no stranger to this either. The first time he dislocated it he was on his mission and since then it has happened a number of times. He has even had surgery on it twice before. Evidently he has genetically screwed up knees and he says we can thank his dad for that, so Thanks Dennis!!

This time the fall broke off a little fragment of his knee cap and tore a few other things, all of which I don't know how to pronounce. We took a fun trip to the ER, at night of course because why would anything ever happen during the day on a weekday?!?! They told us it's bad news and that we need to get into the orthopedic specialist. Not surprising. The surprising part.....our new insurance was not accepted by our ortho guy that we loved. Thankfully we found Dr. Kimball who accepts our insurance and could get Justin in for surgery fast.

On February 18th, two weeks after his ice capades stunt, Justin had knee surgury. And let me just say that this was no minor surgery. The doctor shaved off bone, smoothed out knicks, razored off cartilage, re-aligned Justin's knee cap and there is even a screw in there (for good measure or something?!?!) Justin is successfully becoming the bionic man, one limb at a time :) He is recovering now. It is a slow and very NOT FUN process. Everything seems to be healing correctly and we have been told that this surgery should fix the problem until Justin needs a total knee replacement when we're old fogies (is that how you spell that?!?).

Needless to say, Justin has successfully gotten out of garbage duty for the rest of his life!!