Now we can clearly see the femur, where the plate was attached and the screw holes.  The quadricep muscle is being retracted a bit more to clear even more scar tissue adhesion.

This is my interpretation of the doctors explanation of the first attempted repair.  The suture was woven through the tendon, attached to the patella with two connections and then woven into the muscle.

Not too sure what a patella should look like?  Well, glance at this pic and check it out.  Here it calls the lower portion a ligament.

Here's a nice closeup of the underside of the patella.  You can clearly see several fragments.  The surgeons wound up removing all the disconnected pieces except one about  the size of a quarter.



The blue things that look like threads are sutures from the previous surgery where an attempt was made to reattach the patellar tendon.  It failed, and the closest suture is clearly broken.

Also note how huge my femur looks.  That's because most of what you are looking at was gone, shattered, exploded on the runway.  Doctors used two bottles of bone graft on me, something they have never had to do before in a surgery.   The graft was plastered in my leg to fill in massive gaps.