I KNEE-ded That

Well I am on the other side of knee surgery now and feeling super!  It should be no surprise now how quickly things can turn around.  The surgery went fantastic.  Never had any pain.  Of course I aggressively relaxed if such a thing is possible.  I set up my couch with the TV remote, laptop, cell phone, house phone, light dimmer, pillows, blankets, eye shades, water, pills and the wonder machine - an electric water cooled knee wrap that pumped ice water from an Igloo cooler through tubes into a wrap.  All together, it worked great!  A friend recommended a short TV mini-series to watch so I downloaded that and made myself comfy.  To add an extra thrill to the week, the family decided to go on a "cleanse" diet to help get us ready to start losing weight.  That was a bit more "painful" but we didn't cheat and we made it through (and Mom - Lucie even had me eat 6 whole tomatoes on "Tomato Day!").  At the end of the week, I was down over 9 pounds (3.5% body weight - you do the math...).

Today was the first day of physical therapy and I was apprehensive that the pain I had avoided so far was going to come back in a big way.  Wrong.  PT was excellent.  I knew my legs were in great shape (it's just the rest of me...) so there is really very little for me to do.  Mostly stretching and flexibility exercises.  Probably 3-4 weeks, 3 times per week.  Insurance was supposed to be $50 per session but the PT place called my insurance company and then told me that I had met the deductible cost for the year (that's no surprise) so the $50 was waived!  I called the insurance company to verify but the agent said they were wrong.  Bummer.  I knew it was too good to be true.  30 seconds later the insurance company called back and said THEY were wrong - it was a matter of semantics but I had met the out-of-pocket expense for the year so yes, in fact, I did not need to pay the $50 co-pay!  Great!

So with that news, the weight loss, the leg feeling so much better than pre-surgery, my brain being no worse than ever and other things, life is looking up again.

Over The Pill

The other day I turned 50 but I don't want to talk about it...  But I will blog about it.

Seems like a bunch of relatively minor health issues have been piling up on me lately.  Most of them fixable if I lost about 40 pounds...  Torn meniscus in my right knee, a migraine headache, stomach virus, cholesterol is high, blood pressure is high, weight is high, there was a fear (and actual brief diagnosis) of two strokes...  The birthday celebration wasn't one of the happiest days in my life - a good portion of it was spent at two doctor appointments.  (Lucie did pull off a church surprise party so a bunch of people did sing Happy Birthday to me and we had some excellent Costco cake!)  Could be a lot worse - I recognize that.  So now I am lined up for knee surgery, the "strokes' turned out to be insignificant anomalies in my brain, taking more fish oil pills for the cholesterol (I can now hold my breath underwater for 43 minutes...), and I am taking a low dose blood pressure pill (and monitoring my blood pressure at home).  The good news is that there is no more room in my daily pill container so that means nothing else can go wrong...

Career Ender?

What you see here is a college collage.  Ha!  It is a collection of pictures of me playing intramural basketball at ORU.  (Pretty skinny guy back then!)  But even in these pictures from 30 years ago (WHAT?!  30 YEARS?!), you can see I was having problems with my right knee.  The middle MRI image shows the torn meniscus I will be getting repaired soon (green is good; red is bad).  Hopefully I will be back to playing again.  On the other hand, the last basket I made playing somewhat competitively came from an assist from Elliott so perhaps that is the best way to let it go...