Hi Christie
I am sorry to hear about your needy knees! Ouch. I know how this can feel. I tore both my medial menisci from being overly aggressive in my yoga practice. It took me a long time to heal and eventually I did do the surgery. But, I also did a lot of other work.
Even though your tear is to the lateral meniscus, I believe that an appropriate amount of stress will still be beneficial. Since the tissues are injured, it is easy to do too much, so you must constantly monitor the sensations, but to not stress the knee at all will lead to degeneration making the knee even weaker. See this article on
Antifragility. May I refer also you to this article on
Yin Yoga for the Knees? I think the exercise could help.
It is curious that knee surgery has been shown to work at curing the pain of a torn meniscus (it did for me!) but it has also been shown to be a placebo! Several studies have shown this, but here is
one of the latest. How does the placebo work? One speculation is that the surgery forces you to stop overly stressing the knee and do rehab. It also causes an inflammation of the area which can be healing. The actual tear of the meniscus is not the problem, it turns out. Indeed many people have torn meniscus and no pain at all (as this
study shows.)
Good luck! Let us know how it goes.
Bernie