After over sixteen hundred blog posts sometimes I don’t remember if I’ve written about something before and if so, in what detail. That being said, if I’ve written about my strange knee locking issue before, this will be a review. Get your pencils out, there will be a test at the end.
When I was a teen my knees would strangely lock. Lock being a strong word—something would get displaced on the interior portion of the outside of my knee and while it technically wasn’t locked, my knee would scream very loudly to not unbend my leg or there would be hell to pay—in pain.
I’ve tried all sorts of things over the years, the primary thing being to never get into a position that would cause the locking to happen. It happens infrequently and never when I’m near a doctor trained and qualified to be able to diagnose the situation. It’s something soft-tissue related, likely cartilage. As long as it doesn’t happen, I don’t really need to know what it is. So step one has always been “avoid”.
Step two doesn’t get engaged until the knee gets locked, which it did last night while I was on the ground moving towards a standing position. In the past the situation has been resolved mostly with me writhing around in pain, trying not to move the leg out of a seventy-five degree bent angle as I simultaneously try to press, pull, stretch, bend and yell at the knee in an effort to get it to release.
Sometimes it takes a few minutes, sometimes it’s over more quickly. If things go well, it releases soundlessly and I breath heavily for a few minutes, glad I got out of the lock without the dreaded, “thwock” internal sound signaling a more forceful release. I don’t know if and what damage might occur but silently unlocking seems like the better way to go from a knee preservation perspective.
Last night when my knee locked I started to panic. As I began the to manipulate the knee I realized I was very tense in my leg and the more tense I got the more painful it became—so I did a test. I stopped doing anything and just tried to relax. I slowly started to unbend the knee once I was sure my leg was completely relaxed and to my great relief, the lock just calmly released as I did so, no thwock or sound whatsoever.
When my knee locks, relaxing is the last thing I feel like doing because pain with the prospect of more pain makes it hard to find a mental level of calm. But it worked. Next time, I have a new plan for helping the knee unlock.
The Big Boy Update: We had some very intense rain the other day. It was lightning and thundering and rain was pelting down. Our children excitedly ran out on the porch to watch and talk about the rain. My son called for me in a worried tone to come over to where he was looking. He pointed to one of the drainage pipes below our house that was gushing out water and said, “mom, this is very, very bad. The planet is going to be flooded.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter has been through a lot with her eyes. She is just beginning to work through some of it with her play therapist and her music therapist. In general, she shuts down and doesn’t want to talk about it at all when you ask her things. She made up a very loud “mad song” and a melancholic “sad song” with her music therapist the other day. She also said something to me in an offhanded comment unrelated to anything medical (it was probably when I was brushing her hair, which gets tangled). She said, “that’s what grown-ups do, they hurt lots of people.”
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