Will He or Won’t He?

c) Andrew Carter, 2022

The key question I’m facing right now is whether I will be able to finish my PCT hike this year.  I don’t know the answer.  It depends on how fast my body heals and how soon I want to put additional wear-and-tear on it.

In my last post, I mentioned that I hurt myself when I was hiking back East earlier in the year.  Four days into my first hike on the Benton MacKaye Trail, I was walking downhill when I heard a loud pop in my left knee.  “Uh oh.  What’s that?”

When I was 18, I hurt the same knee playing baseball.  I played catcher.  During practice, a teammate slid over my knee the wrong way.  I didn’t hear it pop, but he did.  I lived with that injury for decades.

What I’d done was damage the cartilage in my knee.  The only treatment I had for it at the time was a cortisone shot.  In the days before arthroscopic surgery, it simply made no sense to have invasive knee surgery to repair such a minor injury.

That knee was always weak, so I wore a knee brace when exercising.  It never gave me any real trouble.  I was able to hike the 2100-mile Appalachian Trail on it when I was 20.

It wasn’t until 40 years later that I had arthroscopic surgery to repair my knee.  That’s because it was getting weaker and was beginning to hurt after exercise.  What the surgeon did was to clean out the cartilage chips in the knee and smooth down the area.

Given my prior experience, I didn’t worry too much about the new injury.  The new injury was to the inside of my left knee.  The old injury was to the outside.

In a trail town, I bought a beefed-up knee brace and was able to finish the Benton MacKaye Trail and the Tuscarora Trail after that.  I hiked 480 miles on the injured knee.  There was no pain, only weakness.

When I was hiking the Tuscarora Trail, I suffered a different injury to my right hip.  That one actually hurt.  It was caused by the pounding of a 14-mile road walk which made my hip sore.  I managed to make it through the remaining 145 miles of my hike, but I was hobbling most of the way.

When I got home, I was able to get an appointment fairly quickly to find out what was wrong with my hip.  Was a hip replacement in my future? (My younger brother has already had one.)

Fortunately, it was something more minor. The pounding of the road walk had caused bursitis.  The remedy was rest, anti-inflammatories, and physical therapy to restore my hip’s full range of motion.  It seems fine now.

It took longer to get an appointment with my knee surgeon.  What I thought I would find out is that I had hurt the inside of my knee the same way I’d injured the outside of the same knee years ago.  I thought I’d be looking at knee surgery in the future with a cortisone shot now to get me through the rest of my PCT hike.

Given that, I was startled to find out that what I’d actually done was to suffer a stress fracture in the knee.  The only solution for that is R-and-R, but for how long?  I’ll have a better sense once I return for a follow-up doctor’s visit on 7/27.

The thing that has me worried is that my knee has begun to hurt since my first doctor’s visit.  Not significantly, but there is a twinge there.

Given this, I’ve been making and remaking plans for returning to the trail.  Before I learned about the stress fracture, I thought I’d be back on the trail in early July.  Now, I’ve delayed hiking until at least the end of July.  But I’m thinking I’ll have to delay again until at least the middle of August.  Realistically, I may have to wait until next year.

Quite the bummer, but it is a first-world problem.  I shouldn’t feel too sorry for myself.  I’ll keep you posted.