What is my Knee Injury?

These two websites ; Website One and website 2 give a good description of a knee meniscus injury. I tore my right knee meniscus on 21 April 2002. The MRI scan in 2002 showed the tears were in three areas :-

1. At the posterior (back) horn of the lateral meniscus (outer leg). Grade 3 tear i.e. goes through the top and bottom surface of the meniscus.
   
2. At the posterior (back again!) medial (inside leg) meniscus. Grade 2 tear i.e. inside the structure but does not go through the surface.
   
3. At the horn (tip) of the lateral meniscus ;degenerative type tear i.e. fraying or tear in all directions.

The symptoms actually appeared on 21 April 2002 whenI was running on a treadmill at the 8 km mark. I experienced an unstable knee and could not bear normal body weight on the right knee.

The actual injury may have occurred one a half years before (Nov 2000) when I twisted my right knee while descending Mount Kinabalu. In fact to this day, I could still recall the sharp pain and my inability to move for several minutes.

One week later, I was OK but I did not realised there was aready damage to my right knee meniscus. The only symptom I experienced was recorded in my training log book in April 2001 where I wrote "sore right knee". That is until 21 April 2002.

I should explain that most meniscus tears are almost impossible to heal by itself. The reason is 80% of the meniscus (inner area) has no blood vesssels. The outer periphery area (20%) has some blood vessels. Only infants have blood vessels in 100% of the meniscus area and by 10 years old, 30% of the meniscus has no blood vessels.

This website gives the repair options for the meniscus.

This website has a forum about knee meniscus problems -it also has a real photo of a knee meniscus. For runners, please check out the Runners World forum.