Knees....

Mine have hurt for YEARS! In 1984, I injured my right knee in a bicycle accident. I used it (my knee) to stop a bike which ended up having no brakes. I stopped at the bottom of the hill when I hit a car fender with my knee. OUCH!! I have had a water pocket on it ever since then--25 years. And, since then, I have favored that knee and put more weight and strain on my left knee. UNTIL 1999, October to be exact, when I fell down some steps and totally wrenched my left knee. I'm talking wrenched, literally...twisted that puppy round and went down. And, in October of 2000, repeat! I re-injured that same knee in a fall down a longer set of stairs. We don't know whether I blacked out for a sec or the knee just went out from under me, but the result was the same either way.

Fast forward all these years and factor in the loss of 200 pounds. For all those years, 25 of them, I was using injured knees. And, for all but the last 3 years, I was packing around all that extra weight. Both knees were arthritic and bone on bone when I had my RNY. I was having cortisone shots in both knees every 3 mos like clockwork. Then, I stopped that in March of 2007 when I had the last set of shots. I hadn't had much problem with either knee since then. I have exercised, walked in marathon relays and other walking events. I was walking 3.5 miles every day Monday through Friday in less than 50 minutes each day. Almost all of a sudden, I started having pain in my left knee on a daily basis. It ached so badly at night. I finally gave in and sought medical attention. After xrays and an MRI, it was decided that it was primarily torn meniscus that was at fault and that the best fix was arthroscopy and trimming up the tears to get rid of the ragged edges that were probably the cause of most of the pain. They put cortisone shots in both knees and scheduled the surgery.

I had the left knee scoped on 8/18. It went fairly well. It was painful, but I was able to put weight on it after a few days and get back to normal stuff with minimal pain after a week or so. It went well enough actually that when I went for my followup appointment on 8/28, I asked about doing the right knee as well as it had begun bothering me more since the surgery on the left knee and the favoring of that knee again. One doc said "let's do an MRI and some xrays and see what we are dealing with..." His partner, who scoped the left knee, said, "Nah, let's just get in there and clean it up. It is probably just about the same as the other was..."

I had the right knee scoped on 9/1. I was told afterwards that I had "lots of tears in the cartilage..." It has been MUCH more painful and was very stiff to begin with. Since then, it has begun this lovely popping/clicking noise with each and every step I take. My brother says it is "musical, like mine" as he has the same issue in one of his knees--the clicking. The doc says it is still very inflamed and needs anti-inflammatories (such as NSAIDs...) and ice and time. I'm not patient, so the time has been hard. I am not supposed to take NSAIDs as an RNY postop, so that hasn't been easy either. Ice...well, getting back to that lack of patience, you sort of have to sit around and be patient for ice to work, right? Not happening very much! So, to get the pain and stiffness and clicking taken care of, I am going to do a hopefully short round of anti-inflammatories and see what happens. If I don't notice any improvement in a few days, we'll see what the doc says on 9/11 when I go back for followup.