The knee saga

I know you’ve been dying to hear it: the knee saga. That is, the process by which I went from being a perfectly happy person in a stinger suit (just look at me sitting there all toothy smiles):
To an awkwardly limping wreck at odds with the medical system.

It all began on a gorgeous, relaxing, sweltering February day while sailing the Whitsundays. I was standing on the roof of our Catamaran admiring the lack of wind and the complete stillness of the vessel (this is important to outline just how thoroughly retarded I am). Then for no reason whatsoever I decided to step down in a way that proved (if anyone had any doubts) that ankles and knees should never be forced to work against each other. That is if your foot is pointing to the right, for instance, your knee should never be straightened at the same time. Especially with a bravado that shouts “look how fantastically I’ve mastered my sea legs.”

Skip forward a couple of grinding cracks, a genuine conviction that my knee had developed a sudden obsession with Cubism (and was trying to mimic a Picasso masterpiece) and some rather forceful demands that Mark beat it back into its original shape (which luckily he refused to do) and we come to me hobbling around the boat, asking for alcohol and bumping into anything I could – regardless of whether it was actually in my way or not. If there had been a psychiatrist onboard I’m sure they would have strapped me up and put me into a padded room for my own safety. But, alas, there was not. Instead Mark’s mum sweetly rubbed VapoRub on my knee.

I won’t take you though the details of the next few days; most of the time I was in a half-drunk stupor anyway. But I will say this: it is very hard, I would even say impossible, to get into a dingy using one leg.

To save you from boredom, I’ll skip past the journey of my knee from grapefruit-sized mass back to near-normal knobbiness. I’ll just say that after a visit to emergency, a stopover at an MRI imaging centre and two sessions with a specialist (which amounted to no less than 13 hours of waiting time), it was determined in no uncertain terms that I did in fact hurt my knee.

More specifically – to quote my MRI – I have a “displaced bucket handle tear of the body and anterior horn of the medial meniscus with a displaced fragment lying medially in the intercondylar notch.”

This is a diagram of what the medical jargon means. It is actually a representation of a diagram drawn by my doctor after I made it clear that all I could see in the MRI was evidence that I got something for my $500…but not something good enough to frame.

Since the writing on my diagram didn't quite come out in the blog, I'll translate:

1. This is a healthy medial meniscus
2. This is my medial meniscus with a bucket handle tear giving me the finger before moving onto diagram 3. (My doctor's diagram wasn't flipping the bird, just in case you were wondering)
3. This is the fragment of my medial meniscus sticking its...er...nose (??) where it doesn't belong

On a related note, I also have “fissuring of the articular cartilage over the lateral patellar facet extending onto the patellar apex”…or more specifically “grade 2-3 chondromalacia of the lateral patellar facet extending onto the patellar apex”

Just to be clear, the first (bucket handle) thing is the real problem; the second thing was, according to my specialist, unlikely to have happened directly at the same time. Secretly I think it was caused by one of my ungraceful one-legged dismounts into the dingy, but I didn’t tell him that.

This is where I’m up to now. Apparently my knee will not be so kind as to grind down the offending fragment in any reasonable amount of time which means that my specialist is going to have to get in there and fix it himself. That’s right; my ridiculous clumsiness is now taking me to the operation room for an arthroscopy. You can read all about the procedure here, but since I’m guessing we all have better things to do with our time, basically it involves the good doc sticking a camera and some medical utensils into my knee and taking the fragment out.

On hearing this news I could only summon two thoughts:

1) I finally get to use my health insurance
and
2) I get to see the inside of my knee (maybe)

I can’t say that I’ve been looking forward to either, but I’m warming to the idea.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the saga of the knee.