I suffered a complete tear in my ACL (soccer) in 2008 and went through with the reconstruction surgery in June of 2009. I was in an interesting position (probably the same one you are in), where I had a choice on whether to do the surgery or not. With a torn ACL, my knee would often 'give out' as I was walking, I believe the scientific term is wonky. :skew: I am interested in what your symptoms are at the moment. The doctor told me I could live with it, or go through with the surgery and as you did, I tried to work through it as well. I also had a close friend who recently had the same issue (torn ACL, soccer as well) and also chose to have the surgery.
I'll tell you the good news and then the not so good news...since you are looking for feedback I want to be completely honest.
My friends surgery went very well, and after a short rehabilitation he was recovered in no time, back to normal (if not stronger than before). My understanding (as others mentioned above) is the meniscus surgery is less intrusive and the recovery time is also fairly short. This should be considered as the typical result.
My surgery, in my opinion, not as well. To this day I am not sure why but the surgery went about 90 minutes past its scheduled completion time and my scars look nothing like a typical ACL surgery would have left. Even my physiotherapist questioned if everything went as planned during my rehabilitation. Anyway, my rehab was also longer than normal (about 1 year) and to this day I still have some problems with my knee. In fact, I have another MRI scheduled on May 17th as I wanted to check if there was anything wrong, or if this is just how I am going to feel for the rest of my life.
With that being said and to help reassure you, if I had to do it all over again I would still make the same decision to go through with the surgery, and I recommend you do the same. If you are nervous as you haven't had surgery before, this should not be a painful experience. I would expect it to be more of an inconvenience than anything.