One Step at a Time

In between 8th and 9th grade, Liam Lambie ‘21 had knee surgery due to an underlying condition. “It was repetitive stress to the Cartilage on the backside of my kneecap and the medical term for it was [an] Extreme Posterior Lateral Osteochondral Femoral Condyle Fracture and there’s literally only one surgeon in the United States who could actually do that surgery successfully and [it] still only had like a 60% chance of working. We first went to some people at UNM and they recommended going in the front, or in the back with a team of vascular surgeons. So, I was really uncomfortable, but he recommended a second opinion and then [it] all kind of happened in like 24 hours.

My parents picked me and Jack up from school one day and they didn’t tell us why. They just said ‘we’re going to Vail, Liam. You have an appointment for your knee.’ It was with one of the best knee surgeons in the world, his name was Dr. LaPrade and when I got there I slept in a hotel and then the morning after, I had the appointment and literally the first thing he said was I need immediate knee surgery in the next three hours. I was in shock but, it was the only person my mom felt comfortable with and she really trusted him, so she kind of made me do it because if I didn’t have the surgery [now] in like 20 years I might not be able to walk. It was very stressful for those three hours while I was signing paperwork and getting my blood drawn and getting ready for the surgery. I’ve never been that nervous in my life. . . I’ve never really had a surgery like that because the only thing I knew going into it was it was going to be a three-hour long surgery with a 60% chance of working. It was going to be really painful and I wouldn’t be myself for a long time and that thought really scared me. So, I remember trying to put on my robe and I couldn’t do it properly. I thought I did, so I walked out into the waiting room and it fell down, so that was a moment. Then I remember them giving me this medicine called Fentanyl and I remember loving it way too much and if I didn’t have the medicine, I probably would have thrown up from the nerves, but that calmed me down and I wouldn’t have cared if they killed me right then.

[Coming out of surgery], it was just such a big shock. Coming out of four or three hours of anesthesia with all those drugs, I literally couldn’t think. I wasn’t myself for weeks after that and they gave me tons and tons of painkillers. Way too much in my opinion. I honestly think that was the worst part about it. . . [and] for some reason it made me relate to drug addicts. [Before], I did not think that drug addicts were normal people and that they were just stupid for not stopping, but now I know how hard it actually is and it doesn’t feel like it’s your choice in the moment. It feels like it’s something you have to do. As much as the doctors helped me, I think that they gave me way too many drugs. I think that was one of the worst problems for the whole thing. I think the pain would have been better than the drugs I was on.

I was in Vail for around two weeks and using a wheelchair and doing physical therapy twice a day and I was on a CPM machine which is a Constant Passive Motion machine which bent my leg back and forth to 50 degrees constantly. I had to be on that for eight hours a day and then I had this ice pack running down my leg and two nerve blocks. So like the first two weeks. I was just trying to get through like hour-by-hour and challenges for me at that moment were just like using the restroom.

Later on, my confidence grew and the pain slowly went away and I took less and less medications, but it was like a full two-year recovery for me. Every day, I tried to have a goal and stick with that goal and push through the pain and I went to physical therapy for two years and every day tried to push myself as much as I could. . . and I tried to focus on small things. It was a time in my life where I felt like I needed to be active and I needed to have fun and do stuff and seeing my brother and friends being able to run around, it was very painful to me. [It] was definitely one of the hardest parts for me, seeing people do things that I wasn’t able to because I wasn’t used to that. Like, I’ve had many other injuries in my life before that, but they weren’t really as limiting as this one and I think the hardest part for me was knowing how long I had. For example, like I broke my arm once and I knew I only had like three months until I was normal, but with this, it could have been, you know five years and I really had no idea and every day where I didn’t notice progress it felt like it was going to take an eternity to fix. I felt like I’d [been] struggling my whole life to fix this and I really didn’t know if it was going to happen and if I’d be able to run again.

It was a sad moment in my life, but it taught me a lot. [It taught me] that pain is temporary and always goes away. . . and I think it helped me realize that no matter how hard life can be, it always gets better and that time we’ll take care of it. . . and it changed everything in my life, physically and mentally and it was something that was terrible and really physically and mentally painful for me, but I look back on it and. . . I think that it was actually something amazing that happened in my life and. . . it really changed my outlook on many things. It made me try stuff that I normally wouldn’t do because I tried. . . theatre and theatre is one of my favorite things to do right now [and] I’ve met so many people from it and so many friends.

It made me realize that you sometimes have to go out of your comfort zone to really, to really experiment with stuff and to enjoy your life as much as you can, but that doesn’t mean to not go out of your comfort zone. . . I know I want to make new friends, I want to explore the world whenever I can. Like any opportunity I get to step out of my comfort zone as long as it’s not going to harm me in any way, I try to take it now because of [my knee surgery], which I think is a good habit to have. . . [and] I’m actually really grateful that it taught me to try things that I normally wouldn’t think of doing. . . [and although] right now I really, I’m really confused of where I want to be, or where, or what I want to do. . . I know I want to be happy with whatever I do and I know I want to be successful in whatever I do and just enjoy life to the fullest right now cause I don’t know what the future holds and I really don’t know where I’ll be. . . We’ll see what happens in the future.”