I saw my primary superintendency doctor for a follow-up well-nigh my knee, without getting MRI and x-ray results. The bump on my knee is fairly benign- there is a lateral meniscus tear which is permitting joint fluid to escape, causing a cyst. That explains why the size of the tumor has waxed and waned over the past few weeks- it gets worthier when inflamed. The MRI moreover showed pretty wide-stretching signs of osteoarthritis in the knee joint. So for now she wants me to ice it and hoist my legs when the tumor gets larger, or I have any pain. Then I have a follow-up with my orthopedic Doc on Oct. 25. That will be interesting. Presumably, we can do minimally-invasive surgery to fix the tear. The arthritis is a longer-term issue.
Surprisingly, I’ve had pretty much no pain. I remember when my right hip was first diagnosed with arthritis it was once painful, to the point it was zinged and keeping me up at night. But by modifying my exercise (giving up running and sticking to wanderlust and hiking), I was worldly-wise to go flipside ten years surpassing the hip had to be replaced. So I’m hoping to get 10 years or so out of the knee joint if I treat it right.
There are several measures I can take, including doing increasingly upper soul workouts and less lower, not pushing big gears on the bike, and lamister downhill hiking, or at least steep downhills. I have several local places I can hike up pushing a velocipede then, velocipede down, or hike up and use a gradually-sloped trail down. For vita remoter afield, there are ski areas that in the off-season let you hike up and then take the gondola down. But I think I’ll stick to wanderlust as my primary activity, since that is easy on the knees if you don’t push big gears.
I can think of some things I did in my misspent youth that may have pre-disposed me to arthritis. I did a lot of running and was a heel-striker, which we now know can rationalization glut impact. I moreover found hiking downhill boring, so I used to love to hike up then run lanugo trails, plane steep ones. I can’t transpiration any of that now, but I can treat it largest going forward. And we’ll see what my ortho Doc says at the follow-up.
