Patella Realignments

[Guest]

Hi everyone,
Last year in septeber and october i had my patella's realigned as they dislocate often. The operation was supposed to make my patellae track straighter rather than be pulled , and track to the side of my knee. I have no knee cap grooves, so my patellae STICK out. After i first had the operations, yes, my knee caps, were lower (As the surgeon tried to push the patellae lower into position) but the past couple of weeks i have noticed that they have gone back to thier old position (Sticking out and tracking to the side again) Im really scared of dislocating them, im not sure what to do! My recovery has been so long.. I have copped so much critisism from my family (Aunts, uncles, dad..)I just want it all to be over. But now that i have noticed theses changes in my knees its hard for me to recover as im PETRIFIED of the dislocating.. Has anyone else had this problem? Is this operation as good as it gets? What should i do?? Im so scared of whats going to happen.. PLEASE HELP!!!
SIMONE xxxx

[cocol]

Hello there,

First of all, I'm hope you are coping ok.

The surgery you had is not such a common surgical procedure and sometimes it fails. For the sounds of it, what they did was to cut your patellar tendon and reattach it to the bone, to make it shorter and realign your patella. The problem is, you see, that sometimes the reattachment site is not very strong and is detached from the union site. Unfortunately, because is a rare procedure there are no statistics about it. I checked with one of my friends (an Orthop surgeon) and he says that you need to get some x-rays done and maybe another surgery.

I'm sorry you are feeling down. Hope it helps.

[Sandy L]

There are four parts to the muscle group that attaches to the patella (that's the meaning of quadriceps). If those get out of balance, the kneecap may be pulled to one side. If the kneecap is drifting to the outside of the knee, the muscles can often be brought into balance by exercises. The traditional approach is to sit on a table, chair, or bed that allows your feet to dangle freely, then repeatedly lift the foot to a horizontal position. To strengthen the medial part particularly, extend the knee the last fifteen to twenty degrees rather than going through the whole range of motion. It typically takes about six weeks to do the jobe, and there is often no sense of improvement during that time. Start slowly and build up the number of repetitions slowly so that you don't hurt yourself.

Having said that, I would counsel against starting that without talking to your physicians. The kneecap riding up may alter the anatomy so that this wouldn't work well or even injure the knee; someone knowledgeable about HMS (and I am not) should examine you and advise if this makes sense in your case.