Ouch! My ACL!

Article and Photos by: Madison Howard, M&M Tipster

This year, Duke Tip offered a Sports Medicine Class. Sixteen lucky students get to learn about sports injuries every day. Here is what happened on June 30, 2010.
Dr. Kristina Black, a clinic and emergency room physical therapist, came to speak to the class. She attended Dunwoody High School and attended college here at UGA. She then moved to Colorado and became a doctor. Originally, sports medicine and orthopedics were not here first choice for a job.
After going through training she decided that it actually was something she wanted to do as a job every day. She talked about injuries that she had witnessed over her years of being a doctor. She works in a hospital and clinic on the bottom of a ski slope in Colorado.
When asked what the most common injury is for skiers she replied, “A torn ACL, definitely. The ligament is really easily torn.” An ACL is a ligament in your knee that is very painful to tear and can cause much damage. In a normal case, there would be six months of physical therapy for a torn ACL. Snowboarders are a very different story. Snowboarders usually tear something in or dislocate their shoulders.
Nine fatalities occurred at the hospital she works at in the last year. Dr. Black works a ten hour day, four times a week. She sees a new patient about every forty minutes. Kristina usually sees around fourteen patients a day in the clinic, but the ER is erratic and the number of patients change every day. In the ER, a patient will always see a physician before seeing her, because she is a physical therapist. That happens mostly because of the MRI. MRIs cost from $1500 to $2000. The physician determines if the patient needs one or not and Dr. Black checks to make sure that the physician’s judgment is correct.
Dr. Black works frequently with post-op patients. She enjoys this because of the attitude challenges she often faces. When people lose their mobility they are often bitter and don’t want to undergo physical therapy. But, Kristina encourages them to continue to try so they may gain some of their mobility back.
Dr. Black is lucky to work with some outstanding physicians. A close worker performed surgery on A-Rod, a famous New York Yankees baseball player. A-Rod had hip surgery to prevent arthritis and to repair some of the ligaments in his hip. Kristina helped Lindsey Vonn, a famous skier, with her agility training. Since Lindsey goes up to seventy to ninety miles per hour, she has to have help from a doctor to prevent injury.
Another patient that she discussed was a twenty- two year old male that was a paraplegic. He broke his neck while diving into a lake. Your neck is divided into sections; he broke the parts of his neck called C3 and C4. C4 is near strands that connect the brain to the body, that is why the man became a paraplegic. He could only move his head and was on a ventilator for a few months. Gradually he began to gain some movement back into his body. By the end of her time working with him, he could move his arm forward and backward. This made driving an electronic chair easier, because when he first got the chair, he controlled it by a special straw that he blew into.
Dr. Kristina Black believes that possibly, in twenty years, science will have evolved more, and being paraplegic could be cured or could be much less severe due to new treatments and medicines.
To be a physical therapist, you must be strong. Lifting patients that don’t have any mobility is not easy; having stregnth makes it easier and faster.
The sports medicine class had finished a debate about football the day before Dr. Black was to speak. When asked if she thought football should be banned, she replied, “No, I don’t think football should be banned. I don’t know what I would do on Saturday nights if UGA didn’t have a football team. But, I do think football should have more penalties. Football is certainly a dangerous sport.”
Dr. Black then said her goodbyes. After this riveting discussion with Dr. Black I interviewed Madeline Taylor, a 14 year old rising freshman from San Antonio, Texas. This is her second year with the Duke Tip program; she attended ASU last year. When asked what her favorite part of the sports medicine class was, she replied, “I like the anatomy part.” This class was originally Madeline’s second choice, but she believes she likes this class better than she would her first choice. Madeline’s first choice was veterinary medicine. She likes her teacher and TA and thinks that, “The things we learn are cool. I find medicine very interesting.”