five days post acl reconstruction. am i hitting the correct milestones?
Hey guys, i’m 21F and 5 days post quadriceps autograph acl reconstruction. I injured it in a muay thai match. I just have some questions to make sure everything is going good and i’m doing everything i should. Here is my story:
I woke up after surgery, and apparently the nerve block didn’t work (they did not explain why), so i was in 10/10 excruciating pain until they gave me Norco and it kicked in. I was in a locked brace at 0 degrees and my acewrap dressing. i barely did anything the first day besides went home and rested. Up until today, i’ve been taking Norco everyday and slowly been weaning it down from taking it every 6 hours to 1-2x a day. mostly at night and in the morning.
On postop day 2, i went to physical therapy as scheduled. At this point i was still experiencing a lot of pain near my quad/knee especially with raising my leg/keeping my leg suspended in air. My physical therapist took me out of the knee brace which idk if he was supposed to do, and tried to help me swing my leg up onto the table i was sitting on so i could lay down. While he was helping me lift my leg to swing it so I could lay down, i screamed because it hurt so bad and immediately start bawling- i felt a sharp pain. Is this normal? And was he supposed to do this? I just hope this physical therapist knows what he’s doing.
After that, he tried to make me do heel slides out of my brace but i couldn’t do much and he pretty much just gave me homework for the weekend to do quad sets, glute sets, and heel slides at home until he sees me again (which will be tomorrow since i’m postop day 5 now).
Since then, i’ve been doing the exercises listed above and bearing a tiny bit of weight on the leg but i’m still walking in crutches. I’ve also been trying to elevate my leg but it HURTS to not have anything behind my knee so idk if i’m doing it as much as i should because it hurts and is so uncomfortable and makes me so sore afterward. My ankle and feet swelling is gone, my knee is a little bit swollen still. Like i said, i have also been weaning myself off my Norco and just try to take it at night and in the morning. I’ve also only had a BM once so i’m gonna try to take more dulcolax daily.
I’m nervous about PT tomorrow bc i want everything to go good but i also do want to hit all the milestones so i recover and I want to eventually get back to muay thai at the level i previously did. Is this realistic?
I also have a few other concerns:
\-Today mainly i’ve been experiencing sharp stinging-like pains ocassionally around my knee at rest. Is this normal?
\-I have pain on parts of my knee like the inside side of it where no incision is, that’s where a lot of my pain is. Is this normal even tho there’s no incision site there?
\- Are the sharp intense pains with certain movements i described normal? It just doesn’t feel right because they are sharp and very painful with certain movements/activation of muscles. Will the sharp pains ever go away? i feel like im always scared to do movements because of it.
\-i just feel so weak still and hope ive been doing enough exercising, but i dont want to overdo it.
Please yall-anybody- just weigh in my entire story and make sure everything is normal/everything is happening according to how it should be. There’s so much conflicting info lol, including my surgery center’s
Any advice is more than welcome as well
Thanks💕