By Lauren Nelson
Some friends get matching jewelry. Others get matching tattoos. But unior Caroline Nelson and Senior Kai? Well, they ended up with matching ACL surgeries — easily the least glamorous option.
Caroline and Kai tore their ACLs the same week, had surgery the same day, and even had the same doctor; both play on Lovett’s varsity soccer team, and now play on Tophat’s 08 GA team; both were cleared to resume playing within a week of each other.
Although their timelines were oddly similar, they both had different experiences in recovery and on the field.
Five days before her 16th birthday, Caroline tore her ACL in a club soccer game. She said the forward on the other team was dribbling towards the goal, so she stepped in front of her, “to shield the ball so I could either turn away or do something with it so that she wouldn’t get it.” In an attempt to get the ball out of the defensive side, her goalie came out to try to collect the ball, “And in doing so, she missed the ball and hit the inside of my foot.”
Caroline said she was immediately taken to the tournament trainer. “They gave me false hope, telling me that I just basically sprained my knee or dislocated my kneecap,” she said. “I felt like a shift. There wasn’t really a pop like most people feel.” Naturally, having the trainer’s opinion and not feeling that pop, Caroline did not think she had torn her ACL, so she was in for a big surprise when she received her MRI results.
”The radiologist guy comes on and he says complete rupture of the ACL,” she said. It was the worst news Caroline could get, and one she definitely did not prepare herself for.
The early recovery period was tough. “It sucked,” she said. “It was just really frustrating because you don’t realize how much you use your legs, but my quad atrophied a lot quicker than I thought it was going to be.”
On August 31, just a week before Caroline’s injury, Kai was in Fort Lauderdale for a club soccer tournament when she had hers. “I went to kick a ball and then the girl that was coming at me missed the ball, but I had already planted, so she kind of clipped me from the back, and it pushed my knee out,” she said.
Both girls were attempting to defend their goal and ended up with a bigger problem.
Unlike Caroline, Kai said she got up and kept playing with a completely torn ACL and sprained MCL. She told me that she had to take herself out of the game, and it wasn’t until she went to the trainer that she noticed something was very wrong. “I went to the trainer to ice and I had to walk, it hurt pretty badly,” she said.
Later, Kai went to get an MRI, which broke the unfortunate news that she had torn her ACL.
On September 4, Kai went to see her surgeon. It was there that Dr. X informed her she sprained her MCL as well.
Kai and Caroline coincidentally both had Dr. X at Emory as their surgeon. He performed their surgery the same day, back-to-back. For each one, he took part of her quad and locked it into her knee as her new ACL with screws.
Recovery focused on getting their legs to equal strength again.
One of the most treacherous parts of post-surgery is being able to straighten and bend your knee again. Kai said she was able to straighten hers pretty quickly, but it was bending her knee that was the real challenge. Caroline said it took her a couple of days. “But even when you get the straight leg brace, my knee wasn’t completely straight; the extension still wasn’t all the way. So I had to work at that,” she said.
Caroline told me she has had many people help her along the way, such as Trina in the Lovett training room, Mike for PT at Emory after surgery, Aaron for PT a few months after surgery, Germaine for strength and conditioning to get her right leg to an equal strength to her left leg, Nate for soccer privates, and finally Dr. X for completing the surgery.
To Caroline, her biggest setback was not having equal strength between her right and left quads because her quad is where Dr. X took the ligament to repair her ACL.
Kai was fortunately able to return to the game on September 6 in her first club game in a little over a year. “I had a great time. I played well. I’m happy. I didn’t think about it while I was playing,” she said. She said she’s looking forward to high school soccer too, because for her, one of the worst parts about being hurt was not playing on the team. Caroline has just been cleared to return to the field. She’s very excited to be ready for gameplay.
