ON BLOGGING

I've been a little off the game for the last week or so as life collided with me. I'm better now but was really hammered flat for awhile and while I came back into battery mentally the physical was somewhat harder to get back. It all started about 5 years ago when I went and looked at some debris left behind in San Diego. It amounted to some tons of debris and like an idiot I shifted through the wreckage looking for anything I wanted to salvage. It was while looking through all that stuff I tore the hell out of my knee causing it to swell up to roughly twice the size of the other knee. At that point I stopped looking, threw my golf clubs and some uniforms over my shoulder, boarded a plane and came home after turning all the rest over to a friend to get rid of however he wished.

That knee keeps coming back to bite me. The pain and swelling return out of the black without warning and it can be really quite painful and leads to an inability to sleep without disturbing people down the block when I move the leg in response to dream stimuli while I'm sleeping and scream. It doesn't make for restful nights. A plan of action and milestones was called for.

I saw the doctor and they were very very tricky about sussing out what caused the pain. The first one allowed as how it sure did look swollen and asked if it hurt. We had a chat about that. He got the 'attending' who came in, sat down in front of me as I sat there on the table and she touched one finger to just one side of my knee and asked if that hurt. Hell yeah it hurt! Not to be shouted down, she put the finger on the other side of the knee, roughly the same place and asked if that hurt. Hell yeah it hurt. She was touching me, not pushing and it was extremely painful.

Well, you all know what it is but it was news to me. While allowing as how in this case it was pointless they did want to resolve any other issues that might be part of the underlying problem and scheduled me for some x-rays while assuring me that what they suspected was wrong would only show up on an MRI. We did the x-rays and hoped for the best. I really am not fond of surgery. The MRI was done on Christmas Eve and I got the results this morning.

You know what gives one a warm fuzzy? Sliding toe first into an MRI with about 4 pounds of surgical steel holding one of your legs together with 13 increasingly 'iffy' screws. Nobody assured me that this stuff wouldn't come flying out once the magnetic field hit it so I can only assume that they knew it was non-magnetic. I guess they could read that off the manufacturer's label they saw when they examined the x-rays.

I have a visit scheduled with an orthopedist next week to go over things but for me the worst bit is that this thing comes and goes at random. I don't know what sets off each episode every year but whatever it is seems to be accelerating.

Plus I was sick.

Oh, and can't focus my right eye all that well. We'll see what Bates Eye Exercises do for that.

I'll probably drop a lot of posts here over the weekend, maybe, after we get back from the party. I've been taking notes but haven't turned them into words.