cruciate knee ligament

Depends on which cruciate you have damaged, how badly and what other ligaments you damaged at the same time. Most commonly damaged playing footy is the anterior cruciate ligament, up to 50% of ACL injuries have associated meniscal injuries; acute injuries are likely to have associated injuries of the medial collateral ligament (the one on the inside of the knee) and meniscus.

To be honest you should be starting to get more movement than that back if it was not too serious an injury. Who diagnosed you injury and where. Most A&E departments will have acces to some sort of acute knee clinic where you can be seen by an orthopaedic surgeon with an interest in knee injuries, or they should be able to refer you directly to the physios if this is deemed appropriate.

Having said that knee injuries can take ages to get fully better and with a lot of ligament injuries there is very little for medics/physios to do until the acute injury is healed. At this point the physios come into their own with exercise programmes to strengthen up the knee again. (A large proportion of the stability of the knee comes from the strength of the muscles and you can loose 20% of the muscle bulk with just two weeks of non-use. this means that once the acute injury is healed the knee is still very weak.)

If it continues to give you grief then a trip to either A&E or your GP may be in order to get referred on to a knee specialist. A&E usually have the fastest access (the acute knee clinic reffered to above) but be prepared to wait to be seen as your injury is not really an 'emergency' in the true sense of the word. Best to go at a quiet time (weekday mornings) and take a book.......

I'd definitely say you should try to reduce the swelling using the frozen peas idea. Maybe 20 minutes on 20 mins off? With my knee I found that it wouldn't fully articulate due to the swelling and that it was inhibiting my movement a lot, resulting in,as Dr Death mentioned muscle wastage. Hopefully you'll get some movement back once it goes down John.

Through not knowing what to do I didn't do the frozen pea thing to my knee, just hoping the swelling would go down. It didn't.

In the end I had to have the excess fluid drained off in a medical procedure. The aspiration experience made me cringe because I don't like needles

Try to reduce the swelling and if things don't get better over the next week or two as Dr Death suggests get yerself down the A&E for a 12 hour wait to see a disinterested Quack :roll:

Good luck and take care

Red Panda wrote:

Try to reduce the swelling and if things don't get better over the next week or two as Dr Death suggests get yerself down the A&E for a 12 hour wait to see a disinterested Quack :roll:

Oy!

Check my profile before slandering us all.



And you won't wait more than four hours these days as your not allowed (government says).

Just messin' !!

Go see your GP and ASK for a referral to a specialist or physio. My experience of A&E after a shoulder injury was : no follow-up. After 2 weeks I consulted my GP and got a physio appointment the next week and am now well on the way to recovery. It will vary from place to place, but if you don't ask you probably won't get.

Marv.

i screwed my knee up badly snowboarding. that was in march!! i still have pain when kneeling down or falling off my bike if my knee compresses or bends more than 90 degrees.

I did what sounds very similar, I could not straighten my right leg fully for nearly 6 months (although it got a little better each day).

I was diagnosed with a bucket handle tear of the cartlidge and whilst in surgery to repair and remove the fragments they discovered a ruptured ACL . According to the docs I ruptured the ACL this inturn allowed my knee joint into a unatural position which inturn gouged a chunk out of my cartlidge which then lodged itself in my knee preventing it from straightening (and why I got a bit better each day as I was grinding the floating cartlidge down slowly).

Hope this isn't whats happened to you as I still cannot play football yet and I did this in Jan 06, although I took up cycling as my surgeon suggested and am loving it.

Gaz