Many of you have very kindly been expressing concern about my recent knee injury. I went to an orthopedist on Thursday, and I thought I’d give you an update on how I’m doing.
Diagnosis: They now don’t think it was a dislocation. They now think it’s a torn meniscus. (The meniscus is a disc of cartilage in the knee joint.)
Prognosis: They kind of don’t know. It could be a lot better fairly quickly; it could take a long time to be fully functional, or indeed even close to fully functional. It probably won’t need surgery, but there’s a reasonable chance that it will. They said I should let pain be my guide: activity won’t injure it worse, so I can whatever I feel like I can do, as long as I add activity back in slowly. But I should expect bad days and good days, bad hours and good hours, fairly unpredictably, at least for a little while.
How I feel: It varies a lot from day to day, and indeed from hour to hour. Last night I had a very bad stretch of about an hour, where it hurt almost as badly as the night I injured it. Today, it feels almost close to normal, I can put weight on it and everything, and today I’m on a cane instead of crutches.
Psychologically, I’m still pretty groggy and out of it. Maybe partly left over from the Vicodin (I haven’t taken any today, but I’ve been on it close to around the clock for close to a week). Probably mostly just because, as Nurse Ingrid reminds me, pain and stress and fear are exhausting.
Writing prognosis: I’m going to try to get some writing done today, but it’s a little hard to concentrate, and I have a tendency to ramble, and did I tell you about the weird quasi-dreams I’ve been having with the Vicodin, they’re not like dreams exactly, they’re more like thought processes that gradually shift into dream form, and… yeah. Like that. I may not be blogging very much this coming week — especially since I have a couple of magazine deadlines, and whatever degree of attention and concentration I have will be going into those. But I’ll do what I can. Not being able to write has been one of the most frustrating things about this whole thing, and I’m going to get back into it as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’ll probably put up a bunch of kitten pictures. Thanks again for the kind words, and I’ll be back full-time as soon as I can.