The body / A personal account
14 knee surgeries.
A life
still moving.
Pain has been part of my life since I was a teenager. It has shaped ordinary days, major decisions and the way I think about what a person is carrying.
Where it began
A basketball injury.
A year of questions.
I tore my ACL playing basketball at fourteen. My first surgery followed about a year later. In my recollection, the injury was initially misdiagnosed. I kept playing basketball and baseball on a knee that was more damaged than I understood.
The years that followed brought more operations, complications, donor meniscus transplants and chronic nerve pain. Surgeries ten, eleven and twelve involved donor meniscal tissue. The story became much longer than I could have imagined at fourteen.
That beginning is part of why I still care about asking questions and understanding what is happening in my own body.
The everyday part
A cane
in my twenties.
A knee giving way in front of people. A car door that would not open far enough for me to get out. Standing for long periods becoming difficult.
Those are some of the details behind the larger story. I used a cane, a disability parking placard and early boarding at airports. Some of the hardest limitations were movements other people could make without thinking.
Pain could be present even when the rest of my life looked busy, capable and successful.
Today, both things are true
I move much better.
I still have pain.
I can move well now, even run. I no longer need a cane or disability parking placard. After years of limitation, those are meaningful changes in daily life.
There are still challenges and sleepless nights. I do not want to erase that part to make the story tidier. The progress matters, and so does an honest account of what remains.
This is my lived experience, not medical advice or a prediction of someone else’s outcome.
The next conversation
How do we live
with what remains?
Chronic pain raises questions about identity, patience and being present for other people.