I’ve been having some knee pain recently which I only noticed when kneeling down, or I should say that I am unable to kneel down. Anyway after a visit to my GP, a hospital referral and an MRI scan I got the results from the surgeon who told me that I have a medial meniscal tear and a meniscal cyst on my left knee and the posterior horn of the medial meniscus in my right knee is torn a long with a rather large bursa which is on the lateral aspect of the tibiofibular joint. In addition a localised area of signal change is seen in the cartilage of the patella which raises the possibility of a cartilage defect.

I have been offered keyhole surgery to repair the meniscal tears but the surgeon recommended that I only do that if I was in pain with my knees all the time or they were stopping me from doing certain activities (like Judo). At present the only thing my knees are stopping me from doing is kneeling down, like when I bow at the beginning of a Judo class, but I’ve bought a couple of knee supports which I’ve been wearing in the gym and more recently when I did BJJ.

I have been advised by the specialist not to do any impact sports, like running and although he didn’t specifically say not to do Judo, I would imagine tachiwaza could be an issue.

So where does this leave me? At the moment I’m giving Judo a rest and concentrating on BJJ where there is less chance of injury, however I still love Judo and miss throwing people so maybe I’ll do one class every two weeks, just to stop myself from going too rusty, and then if I decide I want to try and get my 2 nd dan sometime I can up the training accordingly.