Recent Past

One year ago my daughter gave us a pass to a gym. I went on the treadmill, which I don't ever really remember using before- and I sure did something to my knee after only three times. I went very slow on the treadmill and with no impact, yet I developed this new knee pain along with stiffness swelling and inability to relieve it with position. It was horrible; I had to use a cane to walk, could not tolerate any inclines(or worse declines)
The severity and[persistence of this pain lead me to another orthopedic- one my wife knew from her work as a nurse.

At the first visit, he used words like MRI and arthroscpy which sounded good because he said there was hope to get it better. After my MRI the word changed to replacement because it the MRI was so bad.
The biggest words were bone on bone and ACL deficient along with a bunch of other stuff I had never heard of.

By then it was May and I could not take time off for the summer because of staffing at work; I decided to have it done in Oct but 2-then 3- of my coworkers went on medical leaves so I postponed until 4 Jan 2011 4 days away from today.

So I said that I was going to enjoy the year but it just got worse, not in a the linear downward cycle but the ups and downs but still downward. The wekk after the visit i ddi about the dumbest thing and said the ehck with it and rode like 250 miles in one week, thatw as the end of my knee right there. With the acute pain of few months ago, cycling was the only time it didn't hurt and suddenly when it got better cycling hurt, like every pedal stropke hurt. Not bad pain but n ot fun either.

It has been a year of up and downs and that self doubt that plagued me all year. At times the knee was OK-not even as good as before the year started but OK, at other times I could barely walk and pain. On the one side the argument went like "you are tough you stand the pain" you are too young" never mind the ever present fears of complications,. bad out come. long recovery and the big one for me PAIN.

I finally got all over that and was convinced, at least to myself 100% to go though with it. This was only a month or so ago.

One of the things they say to do is go the dentist before the operation; I did that it was discovered that an old root canal had failed and needed to be removed because it might be infected. Another little twist in this whole thing. Two days before Christmas I had an extraction and went on an antibiotic called clindamycin which tore my guts apart the last time I took it.
yep. Did I mention my fear of dentist, never mind getting a tooth pulled?

All of that went surprisingly well.