I’ve been having some knee pain recently which I only noticed when
kneeling down, or I should say that I am unable to kneel down. Anyway after a
visit to my GP, a hospital referral and an MRI scan I got the results from the
surgeon who told me that I have a medial meniscal tear and a meniscal cyst on
my left knee and the posterior horn of the medial meniscus in my right knee is
torn a long with a rather large bursa which is on the lateral aspect of the
tibiofibular joint. In addition a localised area of signal change is seen in
the cartilage of the patella which raises the possibility of a cartilage
defect.
I have been offered keyhole surgery to repair the meniscal tears but
the surgeon recommended that I only do that if I was in pain with my knees all
the time or they were stopping me from doing certain activities (like Judo). At
present the only thing my knees are stopping me from doing is kneeling down,
like when I bow at the beginning of a Judo class, but I’ve bought a couple of
knee supports which I’ve been wearing in the gym and more recently when I did
BJJ.
I have been advised by the specialist not to do any impact sports,
like running and although he didn’t specifically say not to do Judo, I would
imagine tachiwaza could be an issue.
So where does this leave me? At the moment I’m giving Judo a rest and
concentrating on BJJ where there is less chance of injury, however I still love
Judo and miss throwing people so maybe I’ll do one class every two weeks, just
to stop myself from going too rusty, and then if I decide I want to try and get
my 2nd dan sometime I can up the training accordingly.
So for the time being I’ll be training BJJ exclusively and trying to
improve my knowledge of the ground game.
