Joint Venture

    I love to travel because seeing new places and meeting new people is my favorite kind of adventure.  Lately I haven't had to travel far from home to have new experiences because my joints have expanded my view of the world of orthopedics.  The first joint to mutiny was my left knee.  We have a long history of not getting along.  When I was nine, I was playing in a sawdust pit with my friend Lori.  Lori called me and I turned to look at her. My knee did not.  Lefty never forgave me for forgetting her and from that time on my kneecap dislocated at painful and inconvenient times, like the time it caused me to say a bad word on the library steps at Bible college. Because it didn't happen on the few occasions I was in a doctor's office as a child, my kneecap periodically went AWOL until I was 24.  At that time Lefty had a memorable blowout in the automatic door of a Safeway store in Broomfield, Colorado and refused to go back to its semi-functional state.  Though we had been married four years at the time I required surgery, my husband tried to return me to my dad on warranty. The  surgery worked and my kneecap stays put these days but has significant arthritis and, out of spite for many years of making up for Lefty's deficits, so does my right.
     For years now my body has been going downhill, no thanks to my knees who don't want to go down anything.  For the past few years I have been going downstairs backwards.  The good news is it doesn't hurt a bit that way, the bad news is it's a little awkward out in public.  Last month Lefty became unbending, literally, so the doctor gave me a cortisone shot.  It must work like a lobotomy for stiff necked joints because since then it has been cooperative and pain free.
    Unfortunately my left shoulder felt neglected so cranked the discomfort dial from being a minor "catch" sensation to a "gotcha", so I went back to the orthopedic urgent care I had visited two weeks before.  I was relieved to find out my rotator cuff was fine.  The diagnosis was bicep tendonitis.  Doesn't that sound athletic?  I'm tempted to have that embroidered on a shirt.  The treatment is Celebrex and physical therapy.  Celebrex--good times.  PT, not so much. I can view PT as personal torture, a pain test or God's perfecting technique--that part of the adventure is up to me.