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Living bone-on-bone

Facebook is reminding me that, at this time last year, I was in ago-knee.
At that time, I'd dropped maybe 60 pounds. People -- friends, colleagues and women in the locker room at the pool -- were asking me if I "feel better." My short answer: Yes and no.
Certainly I enjoyed being able to swim 40 lengths in an hour-long session at the pool, or ride up to an hour on the recumbent stationary bike. And it was fun to retire my too-big swimsuits and search the Interwebs for bargain-priced styles a size or two smaller.
"But," I wrote in my Facebook status on this date in 2017, "my knee is still bone on bone."
And it hurt. Oh dearie-dear, did it hurt!
This was when two things became absolutely clear: Weight loss would not be a cure-all, and knee replacement surgery was inevitable.
Now, I don't expect friendly strangers not to comment on another person's weight loss, nor do I take offense when they ask, "Now, don't you feel better?" They mean well. And they've absorbed the culture's faulty presumptions that "fat" is the most unhealthy thing a person can be (and it's ugly, too), and that anything wrong with a fat person's health is repaired by their becoming a thin person -- well, thinner, anyway.
But I truly wish health care professionals would get a clue.
In this case, and at this time, mine did.
It would a couple weeks -- Sept. 1, to be exact -- when I would get in to see my orthopedist. He would try a three-week series of SynVisc shots, injecting a substance into my knee to provide artificial lubricant in the place where the bone meets the bone with no cartilage to cushion it.
Once I got past the side effects (I was one of the unlucky patients who experienced excruciating pain after the first injection), the SynVisc would keep me relatively pain-free for six months.
That's how long it would take to get into surgery. The orthopedist also referred me to a surgeon -- a different one than the fat-shaming, condescending jackass I'd seen six months before, for what turned out to be the consultation from hell.
I remember going into the consultation with the new surgeon in November with 12 pages of documentation of what I'd tried for relief of pain, my weight loss, my setbacks, my conversations with the Dans, etc. As it turned out, I didn't need any of it. He took one look at my X-ray and said, "You're bone on bone. You need this."
Today...well, it's a little humid and overcast, so I feel a twinge of pain in the operative knee.
But I'm anticipating a busy Saturday workday of running around Portage with a camera and notebook -- without crutches, and without ago-knee.


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