4 Knee Ligaments You Don't Want To Break

1) Your Anterior cruciate ligament.  This ligament is probably the most well known due to the amount of professional sports players that injure it.  It gets injured when your knee hyper or hypo-extends.

2.)  Your Posterior cruciate ligament.  This one's pretty hard to break.  You have to have a drastic level of extension done to your leg to tear through the "protection" of the ACL which lies in front of it.

3.) Your Medial collateral ligament.  This guy sits along the outside of your knee.  You can actually feel it if you run your fingers along the "hole" that lies above your kneecap.  Breaking this one requires your leg to bend inward, When this happens, it usually destroys the Medial meniscus below it because of the brute force needed to bend a leg that way.

4.) Your Lateral collater ligament.  This is damaged in the opposite fashion in which your MCL is torn.  Your leg needs to bend outward at a drastic angle.  This usually destroys the lateral meniscus as well.

23 years ago while skiing I completely tore all 4 at the same time.  I hit a small jump, as I had done a thousand times, but caught an edge right at the "lip" of the jump, sending me airborne at an angle.  I landed on one leg and my weight and momentum sent my body twisting to the left.  When I landed the momentum carried that spinning motion downward, causing me to twist the knee like a soda bottle cap or a jar of peanut butter.  Which is pretty much what my knee felt like once I came to a stop.

Since then, I've retorn my ACL 6 more times and my PCL twice.  Some years I waited too long to get surgery, hoping to avoid more surgeries, or maybe just denial.  This caused the already weakened menisci to grind away.  Once that was destroyed, my knee began to grind against the bone, causing my leg to begin to over-correct and bow out.

I've had 4 Total Knee Reconstructions using cadaver parts, pieces of my hamstring muscle, pins and plates.  Last year it was found that my Lateral meniscus was gone, completely, from years of walking on my leg with torn ACLs.  It's also arthritic and in a degenerative state.

Two orthopedists have told me that if I was anyone else that was older I would have an immediate knee replacement.

I still have about 30 years to wait for it.