and that's why I ordered a new pair of hiking shoes!

I had my appointment today to see this uber knee doctor (he's the doc for the Denver Nuggets) about my knee. I have been dreading it since the prognosis looked like it was going to be surgery.

I immediately liked the doc (Dr. Crane) because he started talking about the stuxnet virus and asked if I knew who wrote it. He told me a story about a friend of his that, he said, "worked in black holes". So we talked about that for a few minutes.

Then he asked to see my knee. I was a little embarrassed because the skin from my ice burn was still peeling off. He looked at my shins, which are covered in scratches from when me and my brother cut down some trees last Friday. Then he looked at my foot, which has scars from my flip flops. He said "Hm."

Then he said "There are no good options for you." There's a new surgery where they cut off the entire top of the femur and replace it with cadaver bone. The failure rate is 70%. If it fails I'm stuck with a titanium rod in place of my knee. He could give me a mechanical knee, but he said "Let me give you a boy analogy on what would happen if I do that. It would be the equivalent of buying a brand new corvette with the best tires and giving it to an 18 year old. There's going to be a lot of smoke from the tires, and they aren't going to last long. Judging from the current shape of your leg and foot (pointing to all the scratches and scars) I'm going to guess you would trash a mechanical knee in a few years. Actually, you might be capable of trashing it in 3 months." He sounded kind of proud of me when he said that though it sounds insulting.

Instead he gave me a list of things to do to buy time for my leg. He said if I'll show a little more moderation and wear special inserts and shoes I could maybe keep my zombie knee for another 20 years (he said "the best footwear for you would be shoes made out of marshmallows" - hee). I'm not allowed to do lunges, squats, or wall sits anymore though (I was like "what about push ups?" and he said "those are fine" and I was like "damn" because I hate push ups). He's going to give me injections every 6 months to add some viscosity to my knee.

He checked out my knee movement and told me I'm getting knock kneed (attractive). So I have to keep a board and measure the distance my foot moves away from my other foot when my knees are together once a month. Eventually it will get so bad I have to have surgery because if I don't the medial ligament on the side of my knee will be ruined and it will make the knee replacement less successful. Basically, once my right leg is about 6 inches away from my left it's cutting time.

He wrote me a prescription for work saying I have to only wear running shoes (hooray!). I have to get inserts and an unloader brace. He said I'm lucky because most women can't wear the brace because their legs have too much fat on them (and he said I have attractive legs).

He weighed me so he could figure out how much glucosamine I need to take every day. Then he said "you are the first patient I've had that I've told to gain rather than lose weight". I haven't been eating much lately because of stress from everything going on. He said I should put on 5 pounds or 10 if I can.

On a final note I asked if I had done something wrong to make my knee go bad. He said he was surprised that it's lasted me as long as it has. Cadaver bone replacements are usually not successful. There was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened. I also told him how I told my other doctor that I was going to cut my leg off if they tried to give me a titanium rod and he shook my hand and said "you made the right decision, because if you had the rod in you would be in a much worse position now".

I'm allowed to hike, bike, climb, and ski. No more running though. I'm willing to give that up for 20 more years with my dead body parts.

And that's the more or less happy ending to the story.