Splat! Part 5

When I stepped into the orthopedics clinic, it was sort of a big deal. The last time I’d been there, I’d arrived unglamorously in a wheelchair (“Vroom! Vroom!”), and now I was proudly walking up to the receptionist like a champ, albeit a bit stiffly and sorely. Still, I felt a little like I was back in college, waiting for a big exam to be handed back so I could see my grade. Would I pass my MRI? Or would I flunk out of Healing 101 and learn that my knee was a proverbial ticking timebomb?

After doing the requisite amount of people-watching in the waiting room, I was shuttled into a small examination room and immediately abandoned. As I amused myself by looking blankly at the wall, I kept imagining an automated voice saying, “Your expected wait time is anywhere from 1 to 8 billion minutes.” Eventually, I realized that the walls of the room were quite thin, and I could hear everything that was being said out in the hallway. Shifting my waiting strategy, I began to listen for any interesting tidbits that might pertain to me, perhaps even give me a hint as to if I was going to be receiving good or bad news:

Possible Bad News: “I’ll be there in a minute. I just gotta duck in here and tell this poor sucker we’re going to have to amputate.”

Possible Bad News: “Boy, I sure hope this guy has one heck of an insurance plan!”

Possible Good News: “I love my job! Not only do I get to tell this gentleman he’s going to be healthier than ever, I also get to provide him with the secret formula for hair regrowth!”

Eventually, my doctor came into the room. After some cursory introductions, he sat down at a computer and pulled up what he said were my MRI results. To a layperson such as myself, this appeared to be a 3-D model of something that vaguely resembled a cabbage, which could easily be rotated and viewed on the screen at just about any conceivable angle. Not that I had any proof that it was actually my knee, mind you. I mean, it’s not like your parts are labeled or anything. It could have just as easily been a 3-D representation of a koala’s hamstring and I’d have had no clue. (Assuming, of course, that koalas have hamstrings.)

“Now take a look here,” the doctor said, and I leaned in close to the screen and squinted knowledgably, much like I do at work when somebody is explaining something and I don’t have the foggiest idea as to what’s going on. “You see this here,” he said, pointing to a random spot on the koala hamstring.

“Yup,” I said confidently.

“You see how it’s white?”

“I sure do!” True to his word, the random spot on the screen was indeed white! Now we were getting somewhere!

“Yeah, that shouldn’t be that color at all. That’s where your kneecap bounced off.”

So, as it turns out, at some point during that fateful night I actually dislocated my knee! Luckily, the freewheeling party responsible for this jailbreak, my crazy, ol’ kneecap, had been smart enough to relocate itself back soon after seeing there was nothing fun for it to do in its new premises. Now, while a dislocation wasn’t ideal, I was happy to learn that nothing had been torn. Plus, the dislocation helped to explain a lot, such as why walking around hadn’t been much of an option for several days, and I began to feel better about all of the self-imposed drama I’d heaped on myself. Two sprains and a dislocation!! Now that was something to talk about:

Annoying Guy Trying to Show Off: “I had a pretty bad hamstring pull once. It hurt like heck, but I still managed to finish the game."

Me: “Ankle sprain, knee sprain, kneecap dislocation, which affected both my right and left legs! I couldn't even walk! Read ‘em and weep, buddy!”

Sure, it wouldn’t hold much water with the Torn ACL or Ruptured Achilles clubs, but there would still be occasions where it’d prove useful.

Anyway, after asking a few useless questions, just to make the doctor think I was somewhat intelligent, I was told that everything would hopefully heal on its own. Until then, I’d be provided with a knee brace to help and stabilize things. With that said, the doctor disappeared out into the mist, on his way to rotate cabbages with his next patient.

The brace I was given was the equivalent of getting Coke-bottle glasses for your vision, to the point where it easily could have been mistaken from some sort of medieval torture device. It was large, cumbersome, and had random straps sticking out all over the place. I’m pretty sure I visibly flinched when I saw it for the first time, and my mind quickly went into overdrive: “Put him in the knee brace,” I could hear some ancient king sneering. “NOOOOOOOO!!!!” the prisoner would yell. “Anything but the knee brace!”

But it worked. Once I managed to pull it on, fasten all 47 straps, and get used to my left leg now weighing 30 pounds more than my right, I realized it really did help to support my knee, and that I could now walk more confidently than before! Elated at this discovery, I power-strode out of the clinic, knowing it was just a matter of time before things would all heal up and everything would be back to normal. Sure, the brace would make it so I wouldn’t be wearing leggings anytime soon, but that was just something I’d have to live with.

And that, finally, might be the end of the story.

Splat! Part 4

As I walked into the hospital for my MRI, my stress levels were hitting new heights. I was going to be jammed into a machine that would invasively scan my knee and discover that it now had the same basic structural integrity as a bowl of chocolate pudding! Never mind that I was moving around pretty well and feeling better each and every day. My brain had no room for cold, hard facts such as that, especially when there was stressing out to do!

Once I was situated in the waiting room, I had to fill out a form that asked all kinds of scary metal-related questions, such as if I had any pins, rods, or screws floating around in my body from surgery, if I had any artificial joints, or even if I listened to heavy metal music on the radio. I quickly got the vibe that MRI machines and metal don’t mix, to the point where said machine might explode dramatically if I left even a single stray coin in my pants. This was pretty stressful and distracting, to the point where as I filled out the form, I couldn’t even remember if I had a pacemaker or not. (My answer: “Mayyyybbbeeeeee???”)

Eventually, after I’d signed my life away, I was called from the waiting room and made to deposit all my valuables into a locker. I assumed this was because it would then be much easier for them to wipe my identity from the face of the earth if the procedure were to go awry and the machine reduced me into a steaming pile of goo. I was then brought over to the MRI machine itself, which is basically a gigantic tube that the technician jams you into, laughing maniacally the entire time. Just kidding, they don’t laugh at all. Instead, they simply ask you to lie down, then pile a bunch of weights onto you, making sure there’s no chance of you ever escaping. When you’re fully immobile, they then suck you into the machine and quickly sprint behind a wall roughly 10 feet thick, for the purpose of protecting themselves from the mysterious rays the giant tube is about to bombard your body with.

Lucky for me, since they were scanning just my knee, I didn’t have to go all the way into the Tube of Horrors and deal with claustrophobia. Instead, I was only sucked in to about my waist. They had also given me headphones, so I could listen to music while the machine growled, grunted, and basically sounded as if somebody was running a load of rocks through a dryer. One of the questions on the form I had filled out was what kind of music I wanted to listen to, and I had confidently answered “country.” As I was strapped in, however, I realized that I may have made a terrible mistake. Maybe it would be a bunch of modern weenie-pop country, which I hate! Maybe I’d spend a half hour listening to Thomas Rhett and Sam Hunt, at which point turning into a steaming pile of goo might be a reasonable alternative.

As it turns out, the process went pretty well. The machine was definitely loud, basically drowning out the music from my headphones. Still, I did manage to pick out some Chris Stapleton and Darius Rucker, so it was by no means torture. (There was one Luke Bryan song that came on, and it was touch and go there for a while, but I managed to persevere.) As the machine grunted and groaned, I imagined the mysterious MRI rays shooting deep into my knee, to the point where I honestly could have sworn I felt it tingling and getting hot, which then made me picture a Hot Pocket being left too long in the microwave and exploding. (Sorry for the imagery, but that’s honestly what was on my mind!)

After about 25 minutes on clunking and banging, the machine finally went silent and I was unceremoniously spit out. The technician ambled casually out of his bunker and removed the hundreds of pounds of weights covering my body, leaving me free to go. I was disappointed to learn I wouldn’t be able to see any of the results that day, and instead would have to wait until my follow-up appointment at the orthopedics clinic in about a week, which would be more than enough time to raise my stress levels to even greater heights. But that’s another story.