6 Months 6 Days

I started back to physical therapy on February 23rd after Dr. Frush extended my prescription again and, this time, it was approved.  Each night after physical therapy, I start the draft for a blog post to talk about it. I have yet to post ANY thing from my time at ATI.   The fact that I am so behind in posting bothers me. I couldn’t figure out why I was not taking the time to write and post. Writing blog posts has been great for me for over two years.  It was only yesterday that it really dawned on me. I am depressed.

I’m depressed because I have  been in pain for six months and six days. It’s the kind of pain you feel in your teeth and your eyes.  It’s a pain in your fingertips that you can’t even clinch into fists because that is too painful.  Rather you just open your hands and feel the pain surging through your fingers all the way to your fingernails.   I have in this pain from the second I wake up to the second I go to sleep.

I’ve lost count of how many times my knee has popped out, around 23. It goes to the left and also it has popped out to the front. My Mom has always just popped it back in  so my new colleague, Mr. Langford, says that she is “Hard-core.”  It has popped out multiple times every day for the past week. My son has now witnessed it popping out and he also has had to be “Hard-core” and the one to pop it back in.

My knee feels absolutely wonderful and ATI,  Luba and Brad work with me.  They use the ultrasound machine and manual traction as well as Kinesio tape.  It feels absolutely great but then I leave physical therapy and my knee goes right back to hurting. Because it has hurt for so long, I can pinpoint where it hurts. It hurts on the inside  which is my MCL that I remember seeing the MRI scan and it is torn. It hurts on the outside of my knee where all the cartilage damage was that I also saw and the MRI scan.   Dr. Frush had explained both of these things to me before but now the only time it doesn’t really hurt is when my knee is in traction, when Brad “Opens the joint.”

I’ve thought about this a lot and the fact that it hurts in three different places, a few people have thrown out the suggestion of me needing a total knee replacement.   My aunt had double knee replacements 17 years ago and I remember the excruciating pain she was in! Add that to the fact that I have Multiple Sclerosis; I can’t even think about the time it would take for me to heal from this and how exactly I would rehab this.

This scares me because I know that knee surgery hurts more than having a child (or at least my C-section experience of having a child) and I didn’t have MS the last time I had knee surgery.  I just can’t stand the pain any longer. So I guess six months and six days is my limit. I look forward to tomorrow when I see Dr. Frush and he can tell me what we should do.  All I know is that I just can’t stand being in pain like this anymore.