Kneedled

Wednesday, 19th July 2023.

Nothing to do with cancer this time. Add it to the list. Yesterday I saw the nurse again, Emma, not the specialist nurse I’ve seen twice, Jane’s on holiday. About my swelling. No, keep it clean.

Jane, whose specialisation is ‘tissue viability’ as a phrase a new one on me, but I like it, handed over the process to Emma who did my cancer jecky (Injections before I switched to pills). It turns out Emma knows what she’s doing anyway. The swelling is noticeably diminished, the bandaging hasn’t been too uncomfortable, although it is intrusive if sleeping on my side with my legs together, and fortunately the weather’s a lot cooler. With Tracey’s help I’ve been able to get my foot into a proper shoe and that makes a hell of a difference to the self-worth. I covered most of the stuff about the compression bandages earlier, other than this has been two weeks now and my third iteration of wrappings. The leg is looking closer to normal than it has for half a decade.

At the end of the process I asked Emma how I’d find out about the results of the X-rays to my knees. The results are in, she said. She didn’t really, I can’t remember what she said, but it amounted to the results are in.

MS can, obviously, be severely debilitating, to be amongst a bunch of MSers at a meeting is to see a whole bunch of people ‘walking’ similarly, and it isn’t a new version of disco dancing. The thing that is heavily debilitating for me, no the thing that puts me in constant high-level pain, is my right knee.

I’ve had two key-hole surgery ops on my right knee, one in the nineties and one in ‘09. The second one left me with the observation that the cartilage of my tibia was in real trouble. This time they carried out a new procedure where by they drill holes into the surface of the bone, let the blood and stuff congeal and that forms a protection barrier. 

For a while.

Additionally, the MS physio in Gloucester was confident a lot of the problems for my right knee, much worse than the left, were MS related.

Emma read the notes. Some of the stuff, she said, was above her pay grade but the X-rays showed there was no protective cartilage at all on either surface of the bones, so my knee was effectively bone rubbing on bone (which I could have told them from the pain) and there were signs of osteoarthritis which X-rays had indicated back in 06 when I had first been investigated for symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as MS but were missed at the time.

‘What can we do about it?’

We booked an appointment with a resident knee doctor for 3rd August.

I should be most concerned about the cancer, but right now I just want the pain of my right knee, a constant companion for ten years, to go away.