Everybody in the country now knows what an ACL is. You do not have to say,
“Anterior Cruciate Ligament.” It's the most commonly injured knee ligament we operate on.
Do patients go back and return to sport? Yup. I had a patient yesterday — a family
with three daughters — and I did the 5th ACL reconstruction
with three daughters in high school. So that tells you, we don't have it solved.
Brian and I've been working a while to look at these things.
He has a similar passion that I do and a very creative open mind. To be able to get to where we
are now — in 2021 with three NIH grants — looking at variables associated with ACL injury, surgery,
return to play, muscle function, biomechanics, there’s very few institutions in the country
that have done what we did in the last 10 years at a very small shop.
We’re in the operating room with Dr. Johnson working with him getting samples. We’re working
with him and with his patients after surgery. We’re having the patients come in here and do
advanced biomechanical analyses. We’re going and getting MRI’s and doing advanced imaging of their
knees and of their muscles afterwards. And it's really something that is unparalleled. That's
one of the reasons we've been really successful in terms of our research and our funding, is because
we can do something that really nobody else is able to do because of the close partnership
we have with the Department of Orthopedic Surgery here at the University of Kentucky.
I came out of the clinic, went and I got my PhD, and have committed my life to doing
research to try to help improve outcomes for patients. Our clinic here is custom built to
provide rehabilitation for individuals who’ve had an ACL reconstruction. That’s all we see.
That’s all we do. And along the way, we try to study how they're responding. And so, we can
use that information to help other individuals. And so, we've been able to reach out to a lot of
different communities that traditionally have been disadvantaged from receiving adequate healthcare,
and to bring them in and they're able to get a level of care that they would not
normally be able to receive. So my sophomore year of high school, I was playing high school soccer.
Of course, I've been playing soccer my whole life. And I was playing indoor, which is known
to be kind of dangerous, especially for knees. But I was always like, “I’m fine. I’m fine.”
But one night — late at night game — my knee popped and then the next day my knee
was very very big, and we knew something was wrong. So, we ended up at the clinic
on Monday. We saw Dr. Johnson and he was like, “Yeah, you should definitely get an MRI.”
Got all that done, and it was definitely torn — like shredded. Nothing was there.
I knew absolutely nothing about knees, surgery, ACL’s, anything like that. And now, I kind of
feel like I'm an expert on everything because it's not regular physical therapy. It’s very hands on.
They don't just care about your physical health, they care about your mental health as well. It was
honestly one of the hardest things I've ever been through not just physically, but mentally as well.
This place, it honestly changed my life. It changed my whole outlook on sports and
physical ability, and just the importance of physical therapists. And how
it's not just about your physical ability, it's like they genuinely care about you,
and they want you to do better. I still talk to them all of the time. I keep in contact, and
I just love it here. I find that really exciting. I love being able to come here and work and see
the impact we’re able to have in individual lives. And then also, within our scientific community
as well. It's very rewarding and it really drives me every day to come in here and give it my best.