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The saying “blowing out your knee” is thrown around pretty loosely by people within the sports world. In fact until I tore my ACL at the end of last season I really had no idea what knee injuries were all about. Now that I’ve been through it I have started to see how common and drastic the injury can be.

It seems like the more you look around the more guys are either wearing a brace or are in the process of recovering from a pretty severe knee injury. Craig Conn and Andrew Biers come to mind, as both of them play in the west and both are pretty big name players.

I thought a little insight into the recovery process of a knee injury wouldn’t be a bad idea for a first attempt at writing a blog. So here goes…..

The feeling of a doctor telling you that you are done for the rest of the year is almost as awful as the pain of the injury itself, but it doesn’t compare for a second to the 6-8 month rehab process that follows your surgery. I probably spent close to 3 weeks on crutches after surgery just hobbling around in some pretty excruciating pain. After that I started to make some big gains — I was running and cutting by the three month mark. From there is when it started to really slow down.

I remember talking to Nick Carlson down in Colorado after hearing about his two knee injuries that he had battled through in the past. He said his only words of advice for me were to just take my time and not rush it. That, however, proved to be the most difficult thing as I wanted to get back to playing as soon as I could.

Between physio and the gym its pretty much non-stop if you want to be back on the floor as opposed to sitting in the crowd watching. When you think you’re close you’re still far away, and when I finally got there and was ready to play, I don’t think I have ever huffed and puffed from being out of game shape so much in my life. All in all it sucked a lot but it made me aware of how tough it is to get through it and I gained a world or respect for guys who have done it 1, 2, even 3 times in the past.

Sure I get asked if I need a wheel chair on the floor, or if I need to oil up my brace, but its nothing I haven’t heard before and at the end of the day I just have to laugh at some of the comments because I honestly think some of them are clever as well.

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