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PrintThe Knee Guy
Dr. Peter Rork has repaired thousands of ACLs in his years as a surgeon.
Dr. Peter Rork reads dictation after a follow-up exam with a patient.
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Peter Rork wanted to retire. He was ready, and he had a plan: No more new patients, unless they specifically asked for him. But Jackson wasn’t quite ready to let the man known for fixing knees close up shop. Neither was I.
Ten years earlier I tore my left anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, as a high school tennis player. It’s a pop, a click, and a crunch; the burning sensation of ligaments separating inside—a pain you don’t forget. Now, at twenty-six, my days of competitive sports were long behind me, replaced with the common Jackson Hole inner drive to ski harder, climb higher, and generally move faster.
The snow on January 31, 2009, was soft but packed. Weaving around in the trees, we were moving fast—and then a little too fast. I cut in hard. I heard the pop and felt my knee rip apart. I knew.
Before I even reached the bottom of the mountain I had a plan. Healthy the past few years in Jackson, I knew few doctors. But even I had heard of Dr. Rork, the “knee guy.” In his twenty years as an orthopedic surgeon, he has made repairing ACLs his signature. As friends heard of my knee injury, the question was almost always the same: When are you seeing Dr. Rork? No one asked if I was going to any other doctor.
Rork was in his third year of medical school at the University of Maryland when he decided to become an orthopedic surgeon. He watched as a surgeon straightened a grossly deformed rheumatoid hand. “I had to be that guy,” he says.
Rork did his residency in New Mexico with one of the top hand surgeons in the country. He followed it with a fellowship in hand surgery. He was certain he would become a hand surgeon, but then he took one more fellowship in sports medicine in South Lake Tahoe, California. That’s where he got good at working on knees.
Rork arrived in Jackson in 1990 after spending five years in Sun Valley, Idaho, where patient after patient came to him with torn knee ligaments. He uses a hamstring tendon graft to replace the damaged ACL, the ligament that provides stability to the knee by preventing the tibia (shin bone) from moving forward in relation to the femur (thigh bone). Like magic, the surgery is done arthroscopically, with only a small incision to the knee.
Not surprisingly, the technology of how knees are repaired has changed over the years. Today, most surgeons use the hamstring graft Rork favors. The surgery can also be performed with a cadaver graft; or, like my left ACL, torn ten years before, with a patellar tendon graft.
Rork perfected his technique in the mid-1990s. He was getting a high percentage of good outcomes, and the more he repeated the surgery the same way, the better it went. “I thought, ‘This is it,’” he says.
The day before a surgery, Rork will review the patient’s file. No matter how many times he has reconstructed ACLs in more than twenty years of work, he says, each surgery is a little different, each body built uniquely, each tear created in its own singular way. “People are very creative in how they’ll tear their knee ligaments,” Rork says.
His patients come from the soccer fields, mountain bike trails, and basketball courts. They come from every sport and in every season, but about two-thirds of them come as I did—from the mountains in the winter.
