4 posts tagged “the left knee”

Operation on the 25th.

I went to the doc today, with the knee, to get my third strike at cortisone. He used a lot of the words you don't want to hear coming from your doctor while he is examining you, like "worrying" and "unwanted development". There are, in my book, only a few that he left out, but I guess there's plenty of room for "oops!" and "amputation" in the OR.

I got my operation time upstairs from the OR, or "The Cutter", as they call it. The operation coordinator was a lovely nurse who gave me the first time they had, at 8 am so I wouldn't have to not eat for too long. I felt like I needed to tell her a few things too, so there'd be no surprises.

"You know my dad, right? And how he is very calm and together?"

"Yeah?"

"I didn't inherit that. I'm going to go completely apeshit when I come here"

"Oh don't worry, most young women your age are a bit hysterical. We'll give you meds up ahead to calm you down, and when we have everything attached to you we can just keep on pumping it in. All you need to do is tell us when ever you feel anxious and with you being so tiny we can probably keep it coming until you pass out."

I like her. Wouldn't you?

It should be a breeze, and I'll be skipping around on crutches about 3 weeks from there on. And since a vacuum cleaner is not a crutch, there'll be a lot of dust bunnies greeting Sami when he gets home. But that's not bad because how could anything called bunnies be unwanted, right?

I'm still trying to work things out. Since I will have to have an adult to escort me from the hospital, and Sami is nowhere to be seen, I'll probably spend the rest of that week with my parents, but I'll have to come home no later than sunday to water my plants. And then it'll be a week before Sami comes home. I can't stay longer with my parents because I'll have to take the train to Turku for the operation. I gathered driving would be kind of a big no-no 4 days after the operation, so I can only stay for as long as I have things I can carry back while balancing on 2 sticks.

On the second week, I'm pretty sure I can drive myself to the supermarket. If I don't tell anyone about it. I figured I'll go about my shopping so that I'll give the shopping cart a big shove, then skip behind it on my crutches while praying it doesn't collide with one of the more expensive displays of glassware.

See?! Flawless plan!

I feel a little bit guilty about all of this though. And when I called my boss, she helped me out by groaning about how this will increase the work-load of all of my colleagues. Great. I feel guilty enough when I have a cold, but now I am solely responsible for causing at least 5 burnouts at work because someone is getting paid to slice me up just for my own, selfish pleasure.

It's not like I've warned them since march that something like this might come up eventually.

And still, the guilt is there. But most of all, I feel really happy, because I turned in my thesis today, in complete book-form (more on that some other time), and even though the language advisors can still make it crash and burn, a good nights sleep would be the perfect graduation gift.

I found out today that I was almost sued. Hi, Mom!

I wrote about it in a post I can't find right now, but we had a thief, spaced out on drugs in the pharmacy a while back. He was so out of it and so big that he didn't feel anything no matter how much the guard twisted his arms and stuff. And so when he got a hold of the guards neck with his other hand I went over to help him. The guard that is. He screamed and called us racists and was going to sue us all on assault and battery. This happened to him just because he was a gypsy!

I found out today when I talked to the guard that he had actually had the 'nads to sue us. The district attorney kindly informed him that while it would certainly be interesting to sue "the guard and that tall, dark chick from the pharmacy", it would not be possible. His case was mildly crippled by the fact that he was on a little sumthn' sumthn' and trying to steal and break things at Alko right next to us. Apparently it was also explained to him that being caught, in the midst of all this havoc with not one, but 2 items with which he was believed to intend harming people (a sharpened pair of scissors and a big knife. Hi, Mom!) did not support his case of hate-crime. The popo had a hard time believing that both the guard and that tall, dark chick from the pharmacy went "Gypsies! Let's get 'em!" in the middle of an otherwise normal day of work, and so no-one has actually been sued.

I wonder if he also tried to sue "that guy with the wicker basket who sat on top of me until the police came to get me".

Oh, and one last thing. The district attorney did, however, find it appropriate to prosecute this member of an ethnic minority since most of what he did was kind of criminal in bucketloads of ways, and having other things pending against him from before, he got a ticket for this one but is still going to jail for all the other stuff he's been up to.

That still doens't leave me free from worries. I had that other cortisone shot a few weeks back, and apart from the tendon being upset about getting stung with a needle again for a few days, I really haven't felt it at all. I still have a bit of a bruise from where the surgeon pricked me, but other than that I haven't offered the knee a thought. Stretching and paingel I have. And it's been all good.

Until yesterday.

I got up from the couch (the couch, people!) without any problems. No snap, crackle or pop, but when I stood up it was back. All that goddamn aching. It was like a security wall had just broken down and we were back in square one. Needless to say I didn't sleep much.

Don't really know what to do now, I contacted my doc but couldn't get a hold of him so I'm waiting for him to answer my e-mail. Yes, e-mail. Not allowed to call from work and I'm sure he has nothing better to do than e-mail me back. He did last time and he was really nice.

Anyway. At age 24, I feel like my body is an old battleship that has taken all it can take and is now slowly but securely plunging down in the bermuda triangle. My brain would be the tiny termite, hurrying up the big mast with a mouthful of wood, screaming "Not cool, dude! Not cool!".

So I got this letter from the hospital, explaining what my situation was with the whole jaw-thing. Which was all new and very exciting since I've never gotten papers like this before. Ok, the whole point being was it was, at the very least, crushing to read a few of the sentences. My favourite was "MRI from 2005 shows clear destruction of bone" and "Patient has been suffering from symptoms almost 10 years". It has really been that long. We are going on 8 to be exact.

Okay, so the pain usually comes and goes, and no matter what people say: you get used to it. The ear-aches are the worst, and that's the kind of sharp pain I haven't gotten used to, at least not yet. It's for the better in some things, and for the worse in others.

For the better because you learn to cope. In order to not have to take so much painkillers I have this thing where I analyze it to bits and pieces. I pick apart one feeling and wrap my mind around it and try to examine is it really pain. Does it hurt? Is it more of a metallic feeling? An ache? A sting? A wave of sharper sensations?

You get the picture.

Doing this usually results in that most of the separated sensations don't hurt but are metallic, pressuring etc. And if the part don't hurt, the whole thing can't either. You see the logic? It helps in pretty much everything except for the headache-that-won't-grow-stronger-but-doesn't-go-away, and the ear-ache. The ear-ache is worst. Picture someone shoving an ice-pick down your ear and pulling it out just as fast. Feel that? That's it.

Fortunately the ear-aches aren't that frequent anymore.

Picking them all apart doesn't mean I'm not worried, but you learn to live with it, and going on 8 years, you recognize what is severe and what isn't. I only get panicked about one feeling nowadays and that isn't pain.

I sometimes wake up to feel my jaw growing tighter. Imagine you have a screw right in front of your ear. The imagine someone taking a screwdriver and starting to tighten that screw. Long-haired people can simulate this by grabbing your ponytail and turning it around and around and around to get the feeling (Yes, I have had a lot of time to think about it). The reason I panic is because this feeling is only caused by 2 things. One being the jaw being close to locking, and the last time that happened I spent 6 months folding hamburgers intro my mouth because it would only open 1,5-2cm. The other time this feeling comes around is when I've had dental surgeons injecting a mix of lidocain and cortisone into the joint. And this rarely happens to me at home, waking up, in my own bed.

So, how is it bad then to analyze the pain and pick apart the pieces? Remember the jogger's knee I was suffering from? It has been bugging me 24/7 for the last month or so. Being so used to doing what I do, I don't know if it aches anymore. I have no idea. I mean, I know the metallic/pressure-feeling I feel there is categorized to be pain, I just don't feel it. I know it wakes me up in the night, so something must feel at least bad, right? And I know the only comfortable position to sit in is resting my ankle on my knee and bending it to the side, but I also know I have to lift the upper foot down by hand when I want to get up because I can't do it on my own. And I realize all these things are because of the metallic/pressure-feeling known to be categorized as pain.

I'm in no ways immune to pain, no. And I don't really think I tolerate pain any more than the next person, it's just that you get used to live with these things. Odd, isn't it?

But it is bad because I'm not sure whether or not I should push the treatment of this stupid jogger's knee more actively than I have. If we can establish that it is pain, it isn't going away and it wakes me up for some reason, should I get someone to do something else about in than I already have?

I don't want to because of the following reasons:

I don't want to be broken all the time. I've had treatment to my stupid shoulder that broke when I was into competetive swimming. stretching, hot/cold-treatment, massage, 4 sets of teeth-pads, moulding, injections and finally 2 operations to the stupid jaw. I turn 25 this year, am actively hoping to get a prosthetic joint and don't want to have to seek treatment for my knee because I went jogging like 5 times last year.

Maybe it isn't that broke. If it was real pain, I could still feel it like it should be felt, hurting, right?

And finally. Experience has shown me that unless shit is broken, it don't get fixed. If it is only mildly broken, I will get treatment for it and it will just eventually stall things along so that it will take a much longer time to break so much that it can really be fixed, not only delayed. If I don't treat it now, by any luck it'll be torn to bits and pieces within a few months so that someone will cure it with an injection or once again cut me open somewhere.

Right now it kinda sucks because what ever it is that wakes me up and follows me around all day, is making me hang at the end of my rope. I don't recall when I would've been so pissed. The sarcasm has reached new levels and I am not far from telling a complaining customer who wants to get stuff free and without prescription just where they can shove it. If pushed enough I will do it for them.

If anyone of you had the energy to read aaaaaaall this, then don't worry: I have next week off.

"Wanna know what's wrong with my left knee?"

"Sure."

"It's called Jogger's knee! It's this little tear somewhere around in the back and.."

"Jogger's knee? Woman, are you kidding me? You've jogged like 2 times all this year!"

"More like 10..."

"Come on, you know what I mean. And if it's 10 then you've been doing it secretly because I sure as hell can't recall seeing you in jogging tights that many times."

"Yeah, well, I've always said this body wasn't made for running. You wouldn't take a Ferrari off-roading either!"