Pop It, Lock It, Polka Dot It

The Injury:
The mere mention of three little letters can make even the strongest men cringe: A, C, L. When people ask about my knee, whether its a little kid at the pool or an old lady on MARTA, I get the same sour-faced reaction. Immediately images of Willis McGahee or Tom Brady jump to mind. People always ask how it happened and I don't have quite as dramatic a story. My injury was non-contact, more along the lines of Tony Allen's injury (I was actually watching this game on TV). I was playing ultimate frisbee on offense, running back in after a deep cut. The stall count on the thrower was getting high, so I cut in to get the disc. The disc went up and another player was running about 10 yards in front of me in the opposite direction. I called him off as I had a better angle and an easier play on the disc. I realized as I was in mid-air and about to catch the disc that the other player didn't hear me and was looking back towards the thrower, so I tried to twist my body to the left (CCW) to avoid a bone-jarring full speed collision. I caught the disc with my left hand at the same time as my teammate, but as I was flying by him, it was ripped out of my hand, adding some additional rotational velocity. A split second later a landed on my right foot and I felt my cleat catch in the slightly muddy ground below. My torso kept spinning and my cleats held tight. I could feel my femur displace in my knee and the grinding of bone-on-bone inside my knee. I didn't feel a pop, so much as a sudden stopping of the shearing force and then my cleat came free and I was airborne again, probably propelled by a . Next, I felt my lower leg rebound back in a clockwise direction as I tumbled to the ground. I let out a string of expletives and lay in the fetal position clutching my knee. I was pretty sure I had torn my ACL from the moment I hit the ground, and the reaction of a few people who had seen the accident from the sideline didn't do much to change my opinion.

A minute or two later a trainer came over to check me out. He performed the anterior drawer test, Lachman's test, valgus and varus stress tests. My leg muscles were pretty spastic at this point, so results were inconclusive. Most of the pain was in the back of my knee, so he figured it was a hamstring pull. The hamstrings serve to decelerate the shin bone when running so that the ACL has an easier job of keeping the tibia in place. I guess a hamstring tendon injury could manifest itself as posterior knee pain, but I had a feeling that it was a more substantial injury due to the bone-on-bone sensation I felt and the torquing mechanism of injury, which doesn't really fit the MO of a hamstring injury. He gave me two tylenol and sent me on my way with a bag of ice. I iced in the car on the way home and all night up until bedtime. The swelling seemed to be contained and the pain wasn't too bad by the time I went to sleep. I figured I'd make a doctors appointment sometime the next week to get it checked out. Hey, it's not like I tore both ACLs or anything.