Bad Knee! No Soup For You!

SUMMARY: The meniscus is torn. Surgery likely.

Just talked to the orthopedist this evening. MRI is in. She didn't know it was in when she called me; just returning my call from earlier, so hadn't looked at in great detail. But read the report and looked at some of the images. Medial and lateral meniscus tears. Some wear and tear on the surface of the joint, too--not arthritis (yet) but yes could develop into it. She says I'll probably have to have surgery. She's referring me to a very good sports doc, she says; she didn't say outright but I interpret the discussion as saying it would be a bad idea in this case for me to keep calling them and trying to get in to see just anyone. But that means that for real this time it'll probably be 4-6 weeks before I can score an appointment. That would be after the Nationals.

I talked to her a bit and have been doing reading on knee injuries and have talked to a couple of people who've been through meniscus tears, so I have quite a bit more data than I did a week ago. But I'm a bit emotionally exhausted at the moment so I might or might not type anything up. (Although I might be able to get a copy of my MRI on CD--wouldn't that be cool? I'll have to find out more.)

She said that professionally she thinks I'm crazy for wanting to run at the Nationals with this knee, but as a human she understands what it means to me and she's not going to try to stop me (because, obviously, she can't if I want to do it anyway). She'll recommend a velcro brace that she says probably won't do much for me but if I think it makes me feel better, that's fine. And... so... I'm going to go to Madera next weekend, try running Tika in Snooker at least, Boost in Standard at least, see whether I can get someone else to run Tika some, and just decide there what else I want to do. Argh.

Then it's only 2 weeks after that to the Nationals, and I *really* don't know what I'm going to do there. Karey suggested maybe one of those cool little razor scooters for getting around the site--I've been looking at them and checking them out since they came out, oh, jeez, seems like only a few years ago but it's probably been a while. Not that I need to spend more money, but that might be a good way to do it. Better than trying to bring my dilapidated bike up to working order and trying to get it to scottsdale with everything else we'll be trying to back into my minivan.

So tomorrow, to make myself feel better, I'm going to go town to Renfaire at Casa de Fruta and walk around a lot. (No, no, I'm already planning to be there only a couple of hours max, with lots of sitting down in between.)