No News is….

Not sure where the “no news is good news” thing comes from.  I guess it has it’s good points, but as the continuing knee saga unfolds… I’m not sure I agree…

After weeks of physical therapy, I went back to the orthopedist last week.  I had improvement in physical therapy, but in the end, I had hit a plateau that I couldn’t seem to get around.  The improvement just leveled off and stopped.  And after weeks of that, the physical therapy people said it was time to go back.

The orthopedist agreed and ordered an MRI, which was Friday. This was in the same week that I had to go to Chicago.  Thursday night, in fact, I flew back.  That’s a whole nightmare of its own.  High winds (why aren’t they used to that in the windy city), couldn’t get on a flight, got moved to like 6 different gates… and when the flight took off, it was the absolutely worst take off of my life.  Not the pilots doing.  I should say I never felt like we were going to crash, but there was no question that we were flying into some hell winds.  The fasten seat belt light was barely off during the flight but it did eventually smooth out.

With all the delays, I got home after 1am…  And my MRI was at 8am…  yeh… I nearly slept through it, which may not be a bad thing as it definitely took the edge off the experience of having my knee mechanically restrained and my whole body being shoved through what amounted to a giant dough-nut.  Blind of course… no glasses…

And then I waited… from Friday to today… for the results…  In that time, I was all over the place. I have a good imagination, so believe me, I came up with some doozies.   And other times, I imagined that in fact, I’d find out nothing.

Per usual, I was waiting forever to see the doctor.  And again, all the horrible ideas went on their parade through my subconscious.   Did the nurse seem a little aloof when she said the doctor would be back with my results?  Oh, wait, no, not my imagination, but she had been that way everytime so far… nothing new…

Which was pretty much the mantra of today.  Nothing new…  Tendonitis…

Hmm…  lovely…  although they indicated yet another tendon… one that as far as I can tell doesn’t bother me, but what do I know…

And the only new news I could have done without.  The MRI shows evidence of early arthritis on the back of my knee cap…   Eventually I’ll have issues with it catching and maybe locking on me.  Lovely, this is like being told eventually you’ll get shot, but not when.  Now, the good news was that when that time comes, they can scrape of the back of my knee cap and fix it…

In fact, he mentioned surgery today as a possibility, not per se just for the knee cap but in the way of exploratory to try to find the issue.  But I asked if it were him, would he do that at this point, and he said no.

Back to physical therapy for another six weeks and then back to him for a follow-up to see what we shall see…

I’m in a really dour state of mind right now.  I was relieved that it’s nothing horrible, but after five months and so little ground gained… It’s just getting mentally rough. I have to remind myself when it started, the stairs were a hurdle.  I was only going up and down when I had to go up or down. And that much did improve.  But I can’t get past this constant pain.  All the pain meds I’ve tried made me sick.  And yet, day after day, a variable intensity but constant pain…  it takes it’s toll…

I’ll snap out of this later… but that’s where I am right now…