A high-school football cartilage break, a failed reattachment — and a fresh donor plug that fit perfectly.

I love to do CrossFit — it's a big part of my life. It can consist of anything from running to lifting weights. Ninth grade and high school football, I was hit in the knee — it broke off a piece of cartilage that was reattached by a previous doctor. Over a duration of time the screws backed out and created some damage in there. When they reattached it, the piece of cartilage ended up being a lower spot than it should have been. He's a young active guy who essentially lived in the gym and defined himself by being active and being healthy. He had surgery on his right knee a long time ago — he had some cartilage damage. It was fixed, but… it really didn't feel like I was getting explanations on what was going on with my knee and why things were happening and what I was experiencing. It wasn't just, sorry, we didn't see enough going on. So you kind of laid it out — maybe when you're here in your 50s or 60s we'll do a knee replacement. For him, the best was a cartilage transplant — and within cartilage transplants, what is called a fresh osteochondral allograft, meaning we take donor tissue. The damaged area in his knee I removed, and from the donor tissue I made a plug of bone and cartilage that fits the damaged area perfectly. He knows what he's doing, and he's a very confident surgeon. It's not just, we've got to go in and scope your knee and see what's going on — we're going to find out what's going on and then we're going to fix the problem.