Woe is Knee

I had hoped my knee injury occurred due to doing something really heroic. Like carrying children from a burning orphanage or scoring the winning goal against the Russians in some World Cup hockey contest while a feisty defenseman hacked at me in a futile attempt to stop me.

No, instead, the medial meniscus tore in my left knee as I was hauling my fat ass up some steps at work.

I stepped, turned and…. Ouch. The “pop” noise was almost as loud as the bad word that fell out of my mouth.

Such is the price of getting old, I guess. I ended up going to the doctor two days later when the knee continued to swell and I had the gait of a wooden peg-legged pirate with termite issues. The doc took an x-ray which showed a chip of cartilage floating around. He diagnosed it as a torn meniscus and said I had a better than 50-percent chance of facing surgery. Because I have two jobs and no time for operations, I vowed to prove that theory wrong. (I also have a horrid fear of catheters installed during surgeries. My friend once told me a doctor pulled his catheter out as if he was starting a lawn mower. Also, I don’t want the last thing I hear before succumbing to anesthesia is a nurse saying, “Get the six-year-old boy-sized catheter for this one…”)

Two weeks later, I went to an orthopedic doctor who waggled the knee around , gave me a cortisone shot and bade me well, saying if it kept hurting to see him again. He said the x-ray showed arthritis and wear and tear and he equated my knee situation to a large rock (my body, apparently) being held up by a flimsy soda straw (my left knee hinge). Eventually the knee threw in the towel, saying it was tired of hefting my heft around all the time.

Age is a bummer at my age. When I was young, I never thought of how a body wears down. We used to sneak out of our grade school by jumping out of second story windows and scampering off. I’d fall on my knees constantly while trying to play hockey and we’d leap off of shed roofs while playing, slamming to the ground, rolling around and then getting up to run again.  When I was 16, I had an x-ray that showed a faint, old hairline fracture in my left knee cap. The doctor said standing could be a problem. I promptly got an afterschool job as a dishwasher, standing for the entire eight-hour shift while using a high-pressure sprayer to soak the dishes and my clothing.

I ignored any signs of aging until I did get old. We have a couch at home that sinks in. I need a forklift, rope and Sherpa to lead me out of its clenches because my knees aren’t good enough to propel me out. Holly could just glide right up, but I was straining and popping and cursing the existence of the couch each time I got up.

Now, I sit on a chaise couch thing to put my knee up for quelling the swelling. It helps, but, again, because I’m old, I tend to fall asleep in the thing at the Olde Age Hour of 8 p.m.

And here’s the APBA part: Because of all this, I’m not getting to play the 1947 APBA baseball replay I’m doing at the pace I’ve become accustomed to. Sitting at the baseball game desk for longer than 30 minutes now tends to stiffen the knee.  It’s awful saying that. It seems like it was just recently I was running to my friend’s house in northern Minnesota to play football and baseball in his back yard. Now, I limp to the television set to turn on football and baseball.

I was given a shocking reminder of how old I’ve gotten. I was driving back from the pharmacy late last night. I had a different radio station on than usual and heard the old Elton John song “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” I was immediately transported back to when I was a 17-year-old driving around playing that song on the Elton John’s Greatest Hits 2 album on the 8-track player in my car.

Although I hadn’t heard the song in a long while, I knew all the words and actually sang along (I was alone in the car and it was close to 2 a.m. Most people were sleeping and didn’t have to hear my ‘singing’ as I cruised through their neighborhoods.) I remember how the 8-track split the song up when it shifted tracks and could actually sing the “ka-chunk” of the track change when it happened during the tune.

Then, I realized, that album came out in 1977… 43 years ago (and coincidently the same time I began playing APBA). It just seemed like a moment ago I was driving around howling the same lyrics.

The knee, like the rest of me, is aged. It’s done its job holding me up for more than five decades and I understand the phrase “Wear and tear” a lot more now than when I was a kid. I’d tap my foot to the beat of Elton John’s song like I used to, but it hurts my knee, so I keep that leg still.