Osteophytes, Cortisone and Untested Furniture Upholstery Gel

Some of you who have been hanging around these parts for a while are probably wondering why I haven't gone off in a long rant about the new Texas abortion law.  Well, there's a reason for that--actually two reasons.  The first reason is that I already said what I had to say, way back when the law was actually passed but before it went into effect.  The second reason is that, pretty much, people have done it for me.  The collective journalistic zeitgeist are losing their minds over this law, and to be honest, it's a little refreshing. If I wasn't so concerned about women dying and going to jail, I might even say hell-o!  Wake up call!    

I know some of y'all thought I was Chicken Little, talking about the sky falling, because I kept saying over and over again that access to abortion was going to disappear.  Well, I'm accepting lavish apologies at this site (see below).  As long as we had a fairly normal Supreme Court, I could sort of forgive you for thinking these laws would not stand, but people, we have not had a fairly normal Supreme Court for quite a while now and won't for many years to come.  This means the laws your legislatures pass matter, because some of them, however ridiculous, are going to get upheld.  This also means your state and local elections matter.  So you need to register and then vote, and you need to vote in all the elections, folks.  Not just the flashy ones every four years but the small ones, too, for City Council and school board and stuff like that. Read up on the issues, and then vote.  Not voting is no longer a luxury we can afford if we want to continue to have a democracy.  And those of you who think I'm tossing around hyperbole, that's also what you thought when I was talking about disappearing abortion access.  QED. Again, lavish apologies are being accepted below. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, yours truly woke up with a very sore knee about, oh, say, four weeks ago now.  Before the sore knee, there was about a month of this weird instability, where I felt like I was going to fall down at any moment.  I did not, in fact, ever actually fall down.  However, it didn't occur to me that this was anything out of the ordinary because I take a truckload of medication, people, and about half of them have as a side effect "causes dizziness."  This sense of instability wasn't really the same thing as dizziness, but hey, what do I know.  Maybe dizziness and instability are the same thing.

So I had a sore knee and it was hard to walk around, not to mention impossible to get on the treadmill.  Hell, even getting up and down the three stairs to my laundry room was difficult.  I let this go on for about a month, during which I developed a sore heel on the other foot and this weird nerve thing where it feels like somebody's stabbing me in the ring finger on my left hand.  The weird nerve thing remains unexplained, except to the effect that it's probably some weird nerve thing.  But I did finally go see my Regular Doc about this sore knee business.  

My Regular Doc is okay.  She's fine if you have a sore throat or a sinus infection or high blood pressure or whatever sorts of medical issues normal people have (I wouldn't know).  And as a starting point, again, she's fine.  She took a look at my leg and told me it was one of two things; costochondritis (an inflammation of the tissue behind the kneecap) or a torn meniscus (which usually requires surgery).  She suggested I get a brace with a nice big hole for the kneecap, the kind that prevents any lateral movement of the knee joint, and see if I felt better in two weeks.  So I left planning to do that, and then overnight the pain in my knee joint went from a 4 to about an 8. (More than you ever wanted to know about the one to ten pain scale can be found here.)  And I'm not a very patient person anyway, so I started calling around to orthopedic surgeons.  

I got lucky and got in for an appointment in less than a week.  This Ortho Doc is the doc of a friend of mine and also the colleague of the guy who saw Joan about knee surgery and told her he would do it whenever she was ready.  (She isn't ready yet.)  So I hobbled into the office, went for a bunch of X rays, and then spent what seemed like an inordinately long time waiting in one of those little exam rooms for the Ortho Doc to show up.  Which he did, finally.  He said:  "Well, this is no mystery. You have severe arthritis on your knee, probably on both of them, and it's causing the irritation which is causing you pain."  I was kind of surprised--not about the arthritis part; an X ray tech who shot my chest for possible pneumonia told me five years ago that I had arthritis in my shoulders, so I figure it's pretty much everywhere at this point.  No, I was surprised that the Ortho Doc didn't think anything was torn or otherwise out of place.  Honestly, it feels like somebody's operating a blowtorch under my knee.  How it could feel that way without something seriously torn is a mystery.  

So the Ortho Doc gave me a cortisone shot in my kneecap (ow) and said that it should help.  (It did; it brought the pain back down from an 8 to again about a 4.)  The next step, unfortunately, is a knee replacement.  What he hopes will happen is that the cortisone calms everything down for a while and I can maybe skate another year or so before I have to have my knee replaced.  That would be good, because it can't be done right now.  Why?  Well, because all the hospitals are filled up with people who have COVID (in fact, as of this morning, there were no ICU beds available anywhere in the entire state of Texas, or Oklahoma either).  A knee replacement requires an overnight hospital stay and that Just Can't Be Done at this time.  

I've heard a couple of horror stories about this.  There was a man here in Texas who died of a gallstone, of all the stupid things, because there wasn't a surgery team available anywhere to take it out and his gallbladder became infected and then necrotic while he waited.  Another man who was shot six times waited a week for surgery.  Parents whose kids need an ICU bed are basically being told that they're waiting for someone else's child to die.  And shrieking headlines announce in thirty-point type that our medical system is on the verge of collapse. 

Um.  No.  No, I would say that if we have so little care available that people are dying of gallstones,  our medical system has already collapsed.  

I mean, will I live?  Of course I will.  I can get by on cortisone shots for a while, and if that can't happen for whatever reason (sometimes they quit working) there's always the option of having my knee joint filled with untested furniture upholstery gel.  A friend of mine actually just had this done and we're all sort of waiting to see if she turns into an ottoman.  But look, this was entirely preventable.  All we needed was about 70% of the population to get the COVID vaccine back when it first became available.  That's it.  That's all.  Once you have that many people immunized, the virus drops way off because it doesn't have enough hosts to keep propagating.  Also, things like the Delta variant don't happen for the same reason.  So if you're one of the people who didn't get the shot yet, GO GET THE SHOT.  (Yes, I  know some people can't get the shot for various reasons.  I'm not talking to those people.)  If you're not going to do it for your sorry self, do it for the wife and kids of that guy who died of a gallstone.  And if you're not going to get the shot because Joe Biden told you to or because you want to own the libs or something, fuck you.  Very hard.