The Busted Knee

I’m at home today, not at work.  Actually, I’m at home for the next week and a half.  At least.  Possibly more, depends on the pain and if I can walk again any time soon. 

What Happened?

I’m not exactly sure how long ago it happened, but my best guess is that about 2 years ago I hurt my knee.  I don’t recall I specific event or anything dramatic, but I recall having problems going that far back. 

My knee use to do something really, really neat.  When ever I would bend my right leg at the knee then straighten it out my knee would pop.  Audibly.  Loudly.  So much so that my husband and my trainer both told me I need to get it checked out by a doctor.  Eventually I caved and went to the doc with my magical popping knee and he came back and told me I had a torn meniscus.

Soooo… What Does That Mean?

Well, I have no idea what that “means” aside from what they say on Wikipedia, but I do know what that meant for me: knee surgery.  Also read: pain, no fun, no walking, or owie. 

The doctor and the surgeon agreed that surgery was the only option.  Luckily, they also agreed on microscopic surgery too.  All they needed to do was poke two holes in my knee, one for a camera and one for the tools, and go in and fix the nasty, rogue meniscus.

What They Actually Did

Saturday morning, the husband and I made out way to the surgery center.  I’m nervous as can be, my mother is motherly nervous, and my husband is perhaps the most nervous of us all.  They take me back, explain the procedure, knock me out, then a few hours later I wake up with lots of drugs in my system and a leg that doesn’t want to move.

It turns out that I did not have an actual torn meniscus though.  I had some other torn cartilage in my knee which looks like and acts like a torn meniscus, but it wasn’t the actual meniscus.  End result = same damn thing, but different.

Of course, they did all this while finding a way to freak out my husband.  At some point my husband asked the nurse what was going on with my surgery.  I suppose it was getting into the “taking too long” territory and he had not been updated on anything.  They told him there was a complication and I’d be in surgery for another hour and a half, which spooked him, then came back a minute later and said they thought he was asking about someone else and that I had actually just come out of surgery and they’d bring him back to see me in a moment.

So Why No Work?

After all that, the surgeon recommended I take at least a week off from work.  Not because my work itself is strenuous, but because getting to work would be a problem for someone like me that takes public transit and goes up and down stairs in the process while I only had the use of one leg.

It’s interesting.  I thought I might be excited to take extra time off work, but really I’m not.  I’m in pain, I can’t walk very well, I’m on Vicodin so I’m a little loopy, and I’m missing out on work that I’ll need to catch up on when I go back.  So I can’t really enjoy the time off.

But I do have to say that my husband has been taking care of me very, very well.  I haven’t needed to do anything on my own since I got back.  Hell, he even made lunch up for me today (since he had to go to work) so all I have to do is pop it in the microwave and viola!  I’m in the best hands!

What Now?

Well, nothing much.  Basically, I sit and wait for my knee to get better.  Today I’ll take off the dressing on my knee and over the next few days I’ll start trying to work my knee out and slowly start putting pressure on it.  Supposedly in “no time at all” I’ll be walking like normal again.