9/28/22 FInally Over All The Knee Stuff?

     OMG, I hope we are finally over the knee stuff.  Mijo has lost about half his football season already.  What started as a minor knee injury has turned into a much longer series, but I think we are finally over it.  After hurting his knee, we took him to the doctor, they determined nothing was broken or torn, so it should have healed within a couple weeks.  This did not seem to be the case, so we went to a specialist, he said basically the same thing, to maybe give it a couple more weeks, so we did.  He did say if the pain persisted, we could consider doing an MRI, to which I thought meant we were going to have to go somewhere else, maybe a hospital, so I held back.  After no improvement, we opted for the MRI, I was a bit bothered to know they did the MRI right there, in the same office.  It should have been done right away.  Either way, it did not show any damage, again, but Mijo was still saying it kind of hurt.

    This then got us on the path to try physical therapy, which I liked, they were showing him how to strengthen the other muscles around the knee, such as his gluteus maximus, which are large muscles and the do a lot, when properly formed.  We did this for about three weeks, and although it was super early, I didn't mind much if it meant getting him stronger and back in action.  It was going fine, but not miraculously improving, as I hoped.  Last week, all of a sudden, he developed a cyst/boil behind his knee.  I thought it could just be poked and bled, but everyone thought I was dumb.  That is exactly what they did, the doctor did minor surgery, lanced the boil in the fat part and squeezed all the juicy bits out.

    This now seems to be what is called a baker's cyst, which are very common with knee injuries.  After a knee injury, extra fluid from the knee has to go somewhere, and a lot of the time, it just pools behind the knee.  This is a good safe place for this to happen, there isn't much contact back here.  Once lanced, the knee almost magically started feeling tons better, to the point he was showing us how well he felt with no pain doing these really low squats in the kitchen.

    I am just glad the doctor gave him his blessing to get back on the field.  He will be playing tonight (Thursday), which is what the coach wanted, to get him involved for the district games.