What started as a throbbing pain in the left knee quickly took a turn for the worse.
Brylee Waterman, a sophomore at Lakeland High School, found out she had an osteochondroma, an overgrowth of cartilage and bone that happens at the end of the bone near the growth plate.
She was in third-period P.E. with Mr. Schroeder and she went to kick a ball, resulting in a pop in her knee. The next couple of days she watched it thinking it was just swollen.
She soon realized that the pain was not subsiding, but rather quickly escalating.
“I felt it the next day and there was a big bump on the outside of my knee. At first, I thought it was just swollen but it was not,” Brylee Waterman said.
After a couple of weeks of monitoring it, she decided to visit the doctor to see what was wrong.
“I found out it was an osteochondroma, which is an extra bone growing on my knee,” Waterman said.
With only a couple of options, she took some time to make the best of her summer, before ultimately having surgery to get the bone removed. This lessened her worry about it growing into something much worse like cancer.
In August of 2024, she went in for surgery, costing her the little summer that remained.
“It was hard not being able to do much for the rest of summer. I could not go to the fair or go swimming with my friends. I had to stay home and not do anything,” Waterman said.
With school approaching, she did everything she could to escape crutches before walking through LHS’s doors on Sept. 3.
“The recovery was not as bad as I thought, I am just glad I did not have to go to school on crutches,” Waterman said.
After achieving her goal of being off crutches by the time school came, the rest of the recovery seemed much more manageable.
“I still can not be in still bodies of water, and it hurts to run and jump, but I am glad the recovery went the way it did,” Waterman said.
Almost back to her old outgoing self, she is now striving at LHS, without her extra friend in her knee.
