Pop Goes Quest for Falcons’ Nest

I used to like the word pop. It stood for lots of good things in my life.

I like to call my father pop. On a hot day I like a nice cold soda pop. As a kid I liked the snap, crackle, and pop of Rice Krispies.

But there is another pop--a scary and hurtful pop that will change your life forever. I hope you never hear it.

It’s the incredibly loud pop of a ligament in your knee being stretched beyond its limits and torn to shreds. It drives home the instant realization that a pop may no longer be a good thing.

It was supposed to be a light hike at one of Ventura County’s loveliest spots: Anacapa Island. I had often admired the island’s chiseled outline from downtown Ventura and looked forward to exploring it.

I was lucky, a ranger from Channel Islands National Park told me. A reporter, Hilary MacGregor, and I were to be among the few allowed to venture into the island’s remote western end. We were in pursuit of an endangered species, a pair of peregrine falcons raising their family.

It was a good day. I jumped from the boat to a small raft, and, from the raft onto the rocky shore. Clear turquoise water just barely lapped my boots.

But my luck began to fade as I realized that a light hike for park rangers would be a sheer, terrifying climb for me. The falcons were nesting on a ledge 130 feet above the ocean.

I was sure I had done something crazier during my career as a Times photographer. I stared into the mouth of a Hawaiian volcano as heat from the lava fogged my lens. I covered the L.A. riots while looking out the top hatch of a Humvee.

This, after all, was only a bird.

Even so, I was terrified. But as I shimmied up steep rock walls, I held tightly to that thin shred of luck that had brought me to this beautiful spot in the first place.

I breathed in the clear warm air, looked up at the cloudless sky and smiled as I took one big step up and over a large rock.

Then came the pop--and, with it, a sharp, hot flash of pain. That joyless noise also would usher in months of doctor’s appointments, surgery and physical therapy.

As I collapsed writhing on a boulder, the park ranger told me the pop was simply the sound of vegetation under my feet. I was having a muscle spasm, he said, as my knee bent outward like an elbow.

His diagnosis was wrong, but he made up for it by devising a walking stick out of a metal rod. As I hobbled back down the cliff, he encouraged me.

“Look, we’re more than halfway there,” he cheerfully said, pointing to the boat now 70 feet below us. “You’re doing great!”

Needless to say, looking down was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

That was the advice my husband had given me moments before. He was in Philadelphia on a business trip, and I had called him on my cell phone.

I meant to say a chipper hello and let him know I was in a bit of a predicament. Instead, I shrieked: “Brian, I’m going to die!”

I finally made it down the cliff and back to shore. But the first doctor I saw just gave me Motrin. He told me to return if the pain got a lot worse.

It did.

By dawn, I knew it was time for a more expert opinion.

Dr. Luga Podesta, a sports-medicine specialist, came highly recommended.

Even a worker hosing down lettuce at the supermarket had heard of him. There is only one doctor to see, he advised. A guy in Oxnard with an Italian name that starts with P. . . .

Podesta’s diagnosis: Torn ligament, shattered kneecap.

As I told him just how I came to be in his busy office, I tried to rush through the details. Instead, he stopped me mid-sentence to make sure he had heard right: So, you did all of this trying to get a picture of a bird?

I had to admit I never did get the picture. Hilary ended up with my camera and got the shot.

As I twisted a rubber replica of a knee in my hand, the doctor described the anterior cruciate ligament, an impossible name for a muscle with an improbable job. It holds the thigh bone on top of the shin, while crossing diagonally through the center of the knee.

Like most people, I had never heard of it. In fact, I had never given knees any thought at all. Now I catch myself staring at them in wonder.

Although I needed surgery, my luck still held. My operation would take place at one of the world’s renowned orthopedic surgery centers, the Kerlin Jobe Clinic in Los Angeles. Dr. Ralph Gambardella, my surgeon, was everything you would expect--smart, serious, just witty enough to be both personable and professional.

As I was being put under, he joked: “Marsha, did we get the correct knee? It is the right one, yes?”

Thank goodness for corny ice-breakers.

Since then, I have learned there is quite a fraternity of people with knee injuries. I have met a woman with a double knee replacement, another whose dog has torn the same ligament I did and quite a few humans with the same wobbly knees as mine.

We have become expert on things like range of motion and smooth meniscuses, on patellas and tracking, on the quadriceps and hamstring muscles that will hold everything in place now that the inadequate ligament won’t.

We know the wonder of finely shaved ice that conforms exactly to the shape of your knee as you cool down from a workout at the physical therapist. We of the knee fraternity laughingly call them “physical terrorists,” but nobody sees us through our injuries on a more personal basis.

I was lucky on that score, too. My physical therapist, Larry Brown of HealthSouth, has reveled in my progress even more than I have.

I have also learned about the kindness of strangers. Men twice my age have offered me assistance when it had occurred to me to do likewise for them.

I was even welcomed into a restaurant as “Madame and her ACL-deficient knee” by a maitre d’ who had undergone the same surgery. Without being asked, he grabbed an extra chair so I could elevate my leg.

I find myself living in a whole new world filled with injury-related friends, as well as the old ones who lovingly call from time to time.

At long last, I feel my luck returning, with every step I take.