Going out for a walk...
The weather was wonderful here in the Bay Area today, so I went out for a walk. Not a huge one -- a total of half a mile, but just before christmas, one of my knees decided to secede from the Union and I've been working to bring it back into the fold since.I think I need a bit of a digression for that to make sense. Back in late 2007, I was out birding and walking, and while out, took a step back and landed in a gopher hole, twisting my knee and doing the "hop around on one leg cussing like a sailor" thing. So I got myself home and got ice on it and gave it a couple of weeks to recover.It didn't get better. So I resigned myself to having it checked and went to my doctor, and told him I'd torn the meniscus. So he sent me off to the orthopede and we took xrays of the knees, and he sat me down and said "see this? you've torn your meniscus".
And so I asked him if we needed to go in and clean it up. His response wasn't what I was expecting, it was "no, we're trying to delay your knee replacements as long as possible". And then he showed me the arthritis. Which today I realize shouldn't have surprised me, since there's a family history -- and since i tore the meniscus of one knee back in high school (long before arthroscopic surgery was invented), grumpy knees the predict the weather isn't exactly a new thing.
But I do have to admit hearing that I should expect knee replacements at some point didn't exactly make my day. But we talked over various options and ways to manage it when it flared up, and thanks in large part to 500mg of Relafin twice a day, the last three years have been almost painless (literally), beyond the usual weather predicting grumpiness and the occasional twinge.This wasn't a twinge, however. For reasons I don't know (I have no idea what caused the flareup), the other knee, not the one I messed up in 2007, but the one that's been grumping at me for 30 years, decided to have a major argument; swelled up, stiffened up, lots of pain and general "don't you know it's the freaking holiday, why now?" kind of thing. So for the last month, I've been living mostly on the couch under a heating pad. There were a couple of weeks where I should have used crutches, but I'm too damn stubborn some days...
This is the kind of thing where it just takes time to get the inflammation down, although I was starting to think I might need to get my dosage raised or consider a switch to a different drug (but the Relafin works well, I tolerate it nicely, and honestly, I really don't want to load up on larger doses of NSAIDs unless I absolutely have to...). Fortunately, while it flared up a second time during the trip to SoCal (the main reason we cut the christmas trip short and cancelled our plans for Salton Sea....), it's been slowly getting better and the last week or so has finally been getting almost back to normal.So when I say I went out for a walk, given how things were two weeks ago, that's awesome. Not pain free, but now it's time to start the dance down the thin line of getting exercise onto the joint without so much exercise that it flares up again. The nice thing is, 30 minutes under a heating pad after lunch at work and the stiffness and pain was all gone, which is what I was hoping for. Shows that we're almost back to normal.But this has complicated some of my plans for the last few weeks;
I couldn't implement the exercise program because I couldn't exercise, and I've been doing a lot of sitting on the couch with the iPad consuming stuff rather than at the laptop creating stuff, but that's also a nice break; I don't do that enough, honestly, and it gave me a chance to catch up on some reading, which I'll try to do reviews on soon -- that's been on the todo list for a while.Being limited to what birding I can do from the car has been annoying, so it was nice to get out to EEC in Alviso and wander a bit. And the downtime has given me a chance to put some research time in on some issues, and you'll hopefully see the results soon.And I get to keep my own knees for a while longer, even if they occasionally behave like spoiled teenagers and pout when the weather's bad...
