Week 60 Final Update (Knees, Skiing and Stem Cells: Part 4)

14 months since I had my knees jabbed, and a long time since my last update. I thought I’d wrap up my report on the treatment I had.

TL;DR – it didn’t work. No effect. I’m on knee survival until the inevitable nasty bone work.

Ah well. I tried.

Long version. By last December,  8 weeks after the treatment, I was skiing gentle groomers and the knees were close to returning to their pre-stab state. I continued skiing groomers carefully – it wasn’t difficult as it was a crappy season start – and by the time we arrived at Whistler in mid-January – 14 weeks after the procedure – I was ready for the occasional careful off-piste excursion.

Things were going well until the end of the second day. We decided to head back to Creekside down Lower Franz’s run, which looked pretty benign. Unfortunately, it was anything but! Rock-solid, rutted, ridged, ice – some of the nastiest conditions we’d ever skied in. Anywhere. Ever. By the time the bottom was (very slowly) reached, my knees were a mess.

I kept skiing weekends and going to the gym, but was in survival mode. Constantly icing, skiing carefully, and mostly just pedaling on road and in the gym during the week. The big test was 9 days skiing in Austria in early March. I survived, but it was touch and go on occasions.

On return, it was back to weekend skiing. Oddly, my knees seemed to slowly improve. By the time we hit Crystal in April, I shocked myself by doing 5 laps of North Bowl, a rugged, bumped steep area, with little damaging effect. Was this the miracle I was expecting from my stem cell injections.

If it was, it was a false dawn. I got through to the end of the ski season pretty well, still judicious with terrain choices, but not holding back too much. Then we loaded our backpacks and headed to Europe for vacation. 3 times with my pack on I felt my left knee buckle. Just like it did before the injections. Not a good sign. My pack wasn’t that heavy!

Since returning in July, I’ve ridden my bike a lot and kept up circuit training. The knees have been ok but no better than they were a year ago before the treatment.

I’ve now skied 7 days this season. The first 3 were just early season groomers, and my knees went ok. The last 4 involved some soft (and controlled) bump skiing. By the last day I was back in survival mode with my left knee. Now, 2 days later, after lots of ice of Vitamin I, it feels decent again. But no better than before.

So – did stem cell injections work for me? No – not at all.

Will they work for you? Maybe.

I’m sure all the people I hear Dave Ross interview on KIRO mornings aren’t lying. But I wonder how many would have stories like mine instead of miracle cures?

I wish I could figure that out …

And with that, I’m going to move my ski blog to a new site. WordPress wants to charge me for uploading more photos. So I’m moving to Google-owned blogger.com. You can find all future posts here. So, so long WordPress, and thanks for all the fish 😉