Last December I shattered my right lower leg when one of the plastic "ears" on my almost new Head PRD 12 bindings broke off while skiing high-angled turns on a moderate groomed run at Sun Valley. This has been a long road back and isn't over, but I switched doctors and the new guy, a former ski racer, just took nine screws out of my hardware this week, leaving three screws holding in a long plate down the outside of my tibia. Even though I'm sore from the new incisions my knee already feels a lot more human. Hopefully, getting rid of this metal will let me move better and have less pain with braking forces, like going downhill.
The big surprise, though, was that the doc told me I should go skiing this season. Groomers or powder only, good snow, good visibility and nothing excessive or stupid. I had thought I'd have all the metal out this winter and maybe a total knee replacement a year after that to correct the valgus angle my knee healed with. Nope. Now plan is to leave the rest of the metal in unless/until I get too much knee pain and then to deal with it.
So, I'm looking forward to testing myself on the slant board to check for my tolerance of the forces. I'd appreciate your advice, though, on what are the safest bindings. The broken ones were on my Head Peak 86's, but I have a similar design on the bindings on my Supershapes.
FYI, my lawyer sent the bindings to a laboratory in Michigan that tests plastics and the preliminary report is that the plastic in the binding was defective and that defect was what caused the failure. I'm hesitant to use any binding with plastic in it now, but I really don't know much about alternatives out there. Help?!