Allison's surgery

Allison had surgery on her right knee, originally to shave down the plica that we thought was giving her trouble over the past year.  Plica is tissue and when you look at it in an MRI, it looks like a ligament.  Some people are born with them, others are not.  It did turn out that the plica was the problem, but it was quite a bit tight (rubbing against her knee cap) and had a tear in it (she'll tell you it wasn't from the rock climbing injury when she hit it a year ago--so I have been ignoring her on that account lately).  It had led to some inflammation and what they call "moving pain."  We seemed to get all the explanations we were looking for in the surgery and they ended up removing the whole plica.

It was a full surgery and she and I spent the night at the hospital.  She was unable to bend her knee for almost a week.  She had two crutches for a little more than two weeks and now has one.  She is progressing well.  Total recovery is 6-8 months.  She has physical therapy appointments and exercises.

Not everything went perfect.  She did lose feeling and taste in part of her tongue.  This is very, very rare (in 2015 the hospital we were at performed 6,000 surgeries where they intubated and only 2 had this result).  Cause for concern was that it did not return quickly/initially.  What happened was that they tube in her mouth and throat ended up cutting off the nerve signal by resting on it.  Sometimes the "damage" is permanent.  We were fortunate that about a week later she began to slowly recover from that as well.

Additionally, she was a bit emotional after coming out of anesthesia.  At first we all attributed this to the opposite "effect" of the drug, where people are overly "happy", until it continued on to the next day.  It did begin subsiding day by day and we attributed it to being overwhelmed (just coming in from another time zone, realized the full scope of the recovery, and having to deal with a lot longer time off school than had hoped for).

One funny:  the first time she spoke in the recovery room, was to answer a question that the nurse had asked her.  Unfortunately, for the nurse, she replied in Spanish!

Allison had some wonderful friends stop by the hospital, and again when she got home.  What a huge help that was to cheer her up.

We were glad that they marked the knee before she went it.  They wouldn't draw a happy face and didn't necessarily appreciate my humor in asking.