You tore my ACL to mop-ends

I take it back: it's not okay
August - October, 2009

I writhed in the grass, teeth tearing clumps of grass in pain. My knee was torn, my season over faster than you can say “dime a dozen.” I hoped it wasn’t true, but how many times had I witnessed this scene?

As the golf cart buggied me to the medical tent, fellow Ultimate players gawked. Tucker, you? I thought you were indestructible! I shrugged ruefully. I thought so too. My body, built like a boy’s, is not elegant or gazelle-like as I sometimes wish when I pass the Victoria’s Secret display window, but I have always appreciated its ability to hit the ground hard and not feel a thing until next day’s shower when the water hits the raw wound, yellow from many re-openings.

But this hit I hadn’t seen coming. I had stopped short for a high floaty disc when my trailing defender crashed into me from behind. One teammate said she “climbed up you like you were a tree,” which I can’t quite visualize, but suddenly my knee was ripping as my leg bent sideways faster than my body could fall.

The play was blatantly illegal. You'd never know it, but Ultimate is meant to be a non-contact sport, and the only way number 18 on the Canadian team Traffic had a play on that disc was if my body had turned out to be ectoplasmic. After the game, she apologized. It’s okay, I said, you were just playing hard defense. That was back when hope (aka denial) sprung eternal: it was the meniscus; it was just a strain. It definitely wasn’t a ruptured ACL, since I hadn’t heard that definitive pop (or had I? Who listens when they're gearing up to scream?). Three surgeries, one staph infection, one life-threatening allergic reaction later, can I take it back? You tore my ACL to mop-ends, and it’s not okay.

My surgeon, Dr. Andrew Pearle, came highly recommended, like all the surgeons at the Hospital for Special Surgery. You can tell by the way people nod approvingly – “ah, H.S.S.” – it’s the Ivy League of hospitals. Educate yourself if it floats your boat, but no matter how much or little you know about how your leg-bone will be re-attached to your knee-bone, once you’ve entered the hospital there is nothing you can do to influence the outcome of your surgery. Sure, go ahead and say a beseeching thank you to the operating room nurses before you drift off into aneasthetized death-sleep. What you really mean, of course, is please. Please let the surgeon have had a good night’s sleep. Please let the nurse have thrice-washed her hands. Please don’t let the superbugs bite.

When I emerged from that realm between life and death that Michael Jackson so enjoyed, the surgeon’s words had already sunk in: the surgery was a success. Two weeks later I was walking sans crutches.

At my follow-up my surgeon showed me the dozens of pictures his surgical team had taken of the inside of my knee. Save for the occasional smattering of blood, it was all glowing and snow white, just like the blubber of a dead whale, if you’ve seen the Planet Earth DVD. He said I had excellent tissue, about which I allowed myself to feel smug. Now my healthy body was back in control, nature was taking its course. No more unknowable drugs through IV drips, no more slicing, dicing or arthro-scoping.

Those scrolling digital pictures did not show everything. There was no sign of the microscopic Staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria that had made their way from someone’s skin – possibly my own – into the deep recesses of my knee during the surgery, where they were quietly and cozily reproducing.