Nebraska Medicine’s Post

Transcript

It was April 2nd, 2023. I was playing my first pickup soccer game I played in a year. I found a team, I was very excited. I just took a wrong cut and then immediately went down, heard the pop and knew what I did. So I didn't even honestly cry. I just kind of like sat up and was like wow, OK, I just tore my ACL. So I had worked with Doctor Tao a lot previously when I was a student athletic trainer at Uno and as soon as that happened, I texted him that day saying I definitely tore my ACL. Can we connect and can I have an appointment and then get an MRI and then go through the process? And I remember the conversation where I started talking about it and he was like, well, hold on. Like there is something else that I want you to consider. And so he sent me this article about the bear and he told me to take my time and think about it. And I think I took 24 hours and I texted him back like, go ahead and order it because we're going to do it. Being the first person in Nebraska, two would be pretty awesome. And I know Doctor Tao was excited about it too because mine is called a mid substance tear, so it was right down the middle. They're able to take the two ends and put them back together. If you can kind of imagine, it looks like a packing peanut is how Doctor Tao described it to me. And it really was they sutured that to either end of your ACL and that creates the optimal healing environment for your ACL to reattach to itself. And I was just very upfront with her about her tear, about the current situation in terms of bear versus reconstruction. And then she did a lot of her own research in terms of looking into what some of the data was currently and she came in I think very much. More knowledgeable than most and with her eyes wide open and said I want to do this, I want to be the first Bear patient in Nebraska. She's an athletic trainer. She's rehab people through variety of injuries, including ACL's before. So she has a lot of knowledge about that, but it's always different to go through it as a patient. So I think that's been unique for her and me both, but she's been just a fantastic patient. I think it's a really exciting thing going forward because it's just a little bit more biologically friendly for the knee. It doesn't involve drilling big tunnels. You get to keep and preserve their own tissue as opposed to harvesting. Graph from elsewhere in their knee. I'm excited to have another option going forward for ACL patients. As we get those patient numbers bigger, I think we'll see whether it works as well as we want it to or not. And that may also provide some clarity on this is better for people in their 20s and 30s that are recreationally active as opposed to high school or college athletes that are doing regular cutting and pivoting. I think that we just don't know yet. China's done a really nice job of kind of navigating her way through both meeting the milestones and some of the challenges that have come up for where she's at right now. Things are looking. Promising and the fact that her strength is coming along well, her motion looks really good and her knee joint still feels like the implant has has done his job in providing stability there. I think it went well. I mean, it hasn't retorn and that was kind of my point of did it work or not for me. I'm on track for where, you know, the work I've put in should be, but in my mind, I want it to be quicker. I think it's made me better professionally because now I really, I just had another athlete tear their ACL maybe three months ago. I have this personal connection to it now where I'm able to show more empathy and really show more understanding when they're trying to describe what they're feeling. And I know how it feels now. Just phenomenal. Like I knew it would be his bedside manner from what I saw as the athletic trainer. So on the other side, not as a patient, what you know, it was amazing. He would spend 20 plus minutes in the room with the athlete just describing everything, really listening and taking into account of like their worries and what they were saying. And then I received nothing less. Like just the the 20 plus minutes in the office chatting about my life personally. So then bringing that into the care of my knee just made it seem like it was a family member taking care of me. Ohh. Very positive. I loved it. Yeah, it's awesome.