Mini-Post: Surgery, After All

 When last we left this sordid saga, I had arthritis and couldn't have knee replacement surgery because of Covid.  Well, that's still true, but we have a new development.  The injection of cortisone didn't work, and my doc got concerned because it should have worked.  Cortisone shots nearly always work.  But this one didn't, and so I got stuck in an MRI to find out why it didn't work.

MRIs, by the way, are quite a thing.  They're this long tube, surrounded by a big machine, into which human beings go to get scanned.  While you're in there it sounds kind of like being on a train, or driving across a bridge.  Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop.  Only louder.  So loud they put you in protective headphones and ask you what kind of music you like so you won't get upset while you're stuffed into this tube.  I told them I liked New Age music and they piped in Tracy Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs and Madonna.  Not exactly New Age music but it did make the whoop whoop whoop a little more tolerable.  I was in there for something like 45 minutes.  Every now and then someone interrupted Tracy Chapman to advise that this would take four minutes, or three minutes, or five minutes and fifty seconds.  Whoop whoop whoop.  Then a pause, then more Tracy Chapman, then another four minutes.  It was very surreal.  When it was over, it took two grown men to help me back to my feet.  

A few days later the results came back.  The doc came in and asked me how things were going.  Could I live with my knee the way it was, or was the pain interfering with my life?  After I stopped laughing I told him that, yes, unbelievable as it might sound, level 6 pain at all times except when suitably dosed with Tramadol was, as he put it, interfering with my life.  He said that besides the arthritis, I had a torn meniscus.  I pumped a fist at the ceiling and said, "Yes!  I knew it!"  Which, he said, was not the reaction he was expecting.  I said, "Look, I've been a paralegal for 20 years and I've seen a lot of torn meniscuses (menisci?) and I know they can be fixed."  Well, said the doc, not exactly fixed.  More like ameliorated.  They don't sew the meniscus back together or anything.  They just cut away the torn part, and the pain signals stop.  Or should stop.  Or stop most of the time. 

The meniscus, incidentally, is a tendon that connects the two long leg bones to each other beneath the patella.  I had a nifty drawing all ready to go here but it turned out to be copyrighted, so, never mind.  

Anyway, so, after some three months of limping around with a cane, I find out that I can have surgery after all.  I can get my knee fixed, or at least partially fixed.  Or at least the part that is causing me the most trouble at this exact moment can get fixed.  It's not even a particularly scary procedure.  My insurance covers it, it takes like 15 minutes and I don't have to stay overnight at the hospital, which means it's possible to do.  This is all great, right?  

Well, it is great, but of course I had to do research about all this.  (I am a paralegal, after all.)  And--well.  It seems that having meniscus surgery makes arthritis worse, faster.  Of course, some clinicians say that not fixing a torn meniscus also makes arthritis worse, faster.  Or maybe both are true.  It sort of depends on what article you read.  And some minor percentage of people who have the surgery don't feel any better afterward, and of course this tiny percentage drop dead from an allergic reaction to the anesthetic, and and and.  

Joan says I shouldn't worry.  She had a torn meniscus, got it fixed, and she was fine.  And her arthritis did get worse, but then she also got ten years older.  And getting it fixed was certainly preferable to not being able to walk, which was where we were.  Which is where I am.  And of course, if I keep limping around for another god knows how many months, I'll eventually hurt the left knee.  Tear that meniscus, too.  So there's really nothing to do but to have the surgery.  

In nineteen days, six hours and thirty minutes.