Road to Recovery – Ryan Allan

I checked in with my surgeon, who was very happy with both the strength and the stability of my knee. Hearing how pleased he was gave me quite a lot of confidence; the surgery had undeniably gone accordingly, and now I just had to work hard at rehabbing.

I found myself getting slowly and slowly more frustrated with my knee being stiff and not showing signs of straightening. I understood the severity of my injury could keep me from returning to normality at the commonly predicted time. However, I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong. I was told I’d be six weeks on crutches, maybe slightly longer. But by August, I was still showing no signs of progressing off them.

In my first few months of recovery, I had a lot of contact with semi-retired EPW wrestler, Adam Banks. For those that don’t know, Adam has had three different ACL injuries – two football related and one wrestling related. So, he has suffered through the excruciating healing process and successfully rehabbed his injuries three times! For me, one bout with this was far more than enough; I couldn’t fathom having to go through this another two separate times.

If there was anyone to go to for advice, it was him. His experiences gave me a lot of valuable insight into recovery. Additionally, we both had the same knee surgeon – something we also have in common with former EPW and current WWE superstar, Shane Thorne.

I started to work harder on my knee to try and get it straight. My efforts managed to increase my mobility by 5 degrees, something that my physiotherapist was very happy with. Given this, I thought I was beginning to slog my way into the clear. Instead, I would find on my next visit that there was no improvement…

You can see in my video that my leg didn’t look or rest straight, no matter what I did to push myself. I looked back at the rehab footage and was instantly grated – it felt like it was all in utter vain. If my leg wouldn’t straighten, I knew I wouldn’t be able to walk. This would prevent me from returning to work amongst everything else in my life.

While I knew it would fix my problem, I dreaded going back on the operating table. The last thing I wanted was to endure another surgery. But after weeks of no progress, it was finally dawning on me that the only way to get my leg straight was to go under the knife a second time…