Tearing anything can sound like a nightmare— even if it’s your favorite pair of pants. But, if you just found out that you tore your ACL and had to have surgery for it, it’s nice to know exactly what your ACL is and what you can expect from surgery. Here at Sports, Occupational & Knee Surgery, we like all of our patients to feel informed and confident before their big surgery day.
What is Your ACL?
The Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) is one of four ligaments in your knee and is one of the ligaments that’s more prone to tearing and injury. The ACL crosses diagonally from the back of your tibia to the front of your femur which prevents excessive forward movements and helps control and stabilizes the knee.
How Do Injuries Happen?
When it comes to ACL tears, it’s safe to say that the majority of them are caused by sports-related injuries typically associated with soccer, football, and basketball. However, some patients that we see at Sports, Occupational & Knee surgery suffer from an ACL tear as the results of something like a car accident.
What Does Surgery Do?
There are two types of ACL treatments that we offer at our office including surgical and non-surgical. If it is recommended that you get ACL surgery, we will either reconstruct or repair the torn ligament using a grafting procedure. Typically before surgery and during your consultation, we will be able to identify what exactly we are going to have to do to help fix your ACL.
What is Recovery Like?
The first few weeks of your recovery will be the hardest, but they are also the most important. Even though you may be in pain and your ligaments will be swollen, it’s important that you rehabilitate your knee by performing the proper exercises. Before we send you home to recover, we will give you a detailed list of things to do and avoid while you are home recovering.
Schedule your ACL repair consultation at one of our two locations today!
