This was the wrong day to discover this study.

A major 10-year clinical trial is turning one of the world’s most common knee surgeries on its head. Researchers found that trimming a damaged meniscus—a procedure long believed to relieve pain—offers no real benefit over placebo surgery. Even more surprising, patients who had the operation actually fared worse over time, with more symptoms, poorer function, faster progression of osteoarthritis, and a greater likelihood of needing additional surgery.

Shortly, I’m going in to the local hospital to get an MRI to update the status of my knees before I get that same surgery in less than two weeks.

Fuck. I have been eager to get an operation that promised to ease pain and improve mobility just in time for the summer field season, and now there’s evidence that is also going to diminish the placebo effect.

I’m going in to the local hospital this morning to plan my ambulatory future. I’m getting some X-rays of my knees done, and meeting with an orthopedic surgeon to, I hope, schedule arthropedic surgery to patch up a torn meniscus. This has been pending for over a year — a long, miserable year of aching knees — but my initial treatment was canceled when I had a broken blood vessel in my eye. Clearly, it was too dangerous to operate on my knee!

So, fingers crossed. I really want this surgery to restore my mobility, all of my summer plans hinge on it. This doctor seems to be pretty quick to put off work on the slightest pretext, though, so I don’t have a tremendous amount of confidence that I’m going to be restored soon. I’ll know in a few hours.

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It was a successful meeting: I am scheduled for knee surgery on the 16th of May. Hip hip hooray! Or should that be knee knee hooray?

I walked back into work this morning — the place is really dead today, I think a lot of students are struggling to get back to campus, and those who are here aren’t enthused about walking across snow-choked streets. Since I’d been absent for a few days myself, I had a bunch of chores to catch up on, herding flies and checking on spiders, so I had to do more walking than usual. I noticed something annoying.

I’ve got this torn meniscus in my right knee that has been going untreated, in the hopes that it would close up on its own. It hasn’t. As I was walking, I noticed that my right knee was getting gradually hotter and hotter, like a mechanical part that was out of lubricant. It was getting so hot that I imagined it bursting into flames as I spiraled down into a catastrophic fiery explosion.

I have done the sensible thing and am sitting down in my office as the heat slowly dies down. I don’t think I have to worry about crashing now, but I was concerned about my right pants leg catching fire.

I don’t have to move until my class at 1:00, and I should have cooled down by then. If you hear about a case of spontaneous combustion in western Minnesota, though, I thought I’d let you know so you can all say you know the guy.

Today is our 46th wedding anniversary. I have no idea why she agreed to it in the first place.

No celebration today. We’re both just going to work, she won’t get home until 11pm, we don’t even have dinner plans.

It’s my birthday, and my age is the kind of stupid joke I might have sniggered over when I and my friends were virginal nerds going har-de-har-har around the D&D table fifty years ago. Reality is less amusing.

Here’s the objective assessment.

My knees…if I were a racehorse, I’d be shot. If I stand for long periods of time, the bones tend to sink into the cartilage like its marshmallow fluff and they lock up on me. I might be able to walk away stiff-legged, but I’m desperate to put my butt on a chair and not move for a while. Fortunately, in this day and age I don’t have to worry about running away from sabre-toothed tigers, and even if I had the knees of an athlete, the tiger would catch me anyway.

My back is the current troublemaker. After my little fall last month, it feels like my spine is made of disjointed legos, fishhooks, and shards of glass. It’s much better than when it first happened and I was in so much pain I thought I was going to die, but the process of repair is far from complete. I’m not in pain most of the time, except when I bend, or go to bed — and then it takes forever to find a position that minimizes the grinding. It’s healing, but annoyingly slowly.

My brain seems to be functioning OK, but how would I know?

One nice development is that I developed a scotoma several months ago, a blind spot in my right eye caused by a broken blood vessel. It hasn’t gone away — if I blink fast so the visual field changes from light to dark at a rapid rate, I can still visualize it as a horizontal line of dark blurriness — but neural plasticity for the win. I don’t notice it most of the time, because my brain has rewired itself to compensate and fills in the gap with information from my visual map. I suppose if you aimed a frisbee at just the right angle at my right eyebrow, it could fit into the visual gap and I wouldn’t see it.

So, my weakness right now is against charging frisbee-flinging tigers. I’ll try to avoid them so I can make it to the next funny number, which is 420, I believe. I was fortunate to have timed my birth to completely skip the whole 6-7 nonsense.

My wife got me the perfect Valentine’s Day card.

I’m afraid I got her nothing. I had a severe flare-up of my back injury, and spent much of Valentine’s Day lying in an emergency room experiencing such intense agony that I was certain that I was going to die. Now it’s the day after, I didn’t die, but I’m now covered in patches and doped up on Valium. My response to my recovery was “Oh no, now I’ve got to prepare a week’s worth of lectures that include a whole lot of in-class problems, and I’ve got to make sure the lab crosses are on track,” so I’ve spent Sunday morning frantically updating lectures and sending notes to the students under the assumption that today was Monday and I needed to be ready for my 12:45 class.

I somehow moved from imminent fear of death to imminent fear of missing an hour of class is a serious long term concern over priorities to work over in my brain. I’ll put it on my list of things to get done this week. After I get through classes and labs.

Just letting you all know. I feel like I ought to remind everyone that you carry your self in a bloody gelatinous goo cradled in a bone bowl that you hold about 5 feet above the ground while tottering about on two long sticks, and a fall is a traumatic catastrophe, that no sensible designer would allow to persist. We ought to have four legs, or better yet eight, and our brain ought to be held much closer to the ground. Stupid evolution.

Also, the drugs we take to permit better healing ought not to put you in a stupor that leaves you chronologically confused and incapable of calculating the force generated by a 5 foot fall under an acceleration of 9.8 m/sec². Stupid medicine.

Stupid weather.

Anyway, I’m told it takes 3-5 days to recover from a stupid fall like this. I’m right on track, and insist that I will be recovered enough to inflict more genetics on my students by Monday. I’m supposed to be delivering an online quiz/exercise today, and I’ll have to see how that goes. Would you want to take a quiz composed by an addled brain?

This morning I started walking to work, and I stepped on some ice and went flying, to fall flat on my back, my neck, and my head. I remember that, and I recall curling into a fetal position, and then somehow magically I had gotten up and walked to the science building, climbed the stairs, and gotten in to my office. I have no memory of walking. But a half hour later I texted my wife, “I might need hospital” and blacked out again. Then she showed up in the office, and then somehow I’m in the emergency room. I kept blacking out.

Lots of tests followed. I was concussed but there was no brain bleed and no broken bones. I’m in serious pain, and my rib cage periodically clenches like a fist, but I’m coping with the aid of tramadol and some other muscle relaxant. I have a note from the doctor to excuse me from work for a few days, but come on, my job is not physically demanding, I think I can power through with the assistance of my wheelchair and a few drugs. Because I’m a stupid macho man.

I just found a photo of my maternal grandfather, Paul Clarence Westad.

The patch on his arm says he was an Army technician, 5th class — that meant he served in a non-combat role, but had specialized skills. He was a farm boy straight out of northern Minnesota, and I think his skill was being able to drive a tractor. From the little he said about his service, he was driving a bulldozer and building airfields on remote Pacific islands, but he didn’t talk much at all about what he did. He would tell stories about the giant lizards living in the rafters of his hut, and he had a secret stash of photos he smuggled out at the end of the war that showed burned and chopped up Japanese corpses, so I think part of his duties involved burial details.

He came out of the war with incipient alcoholism and possibly a bit of PTSD. He worked for the Washington State highway department driving a bulldozer, naturally enough, until the alcoholism left him a wreck. I have great memories of him when I was a child that turned into horror stories when I was an adult. I don’t know if I can blame the war, but maybe.