Knee News

So I went to an ortho­pe­dic guy at Metro­Health to talk about my chron­ic knee trou­ble. He was the sports med­i­cine ortho­pe­dic guy, a com­pet­i­tive cyclist and triath­lete. We had a good chat. The ini­tial x‑rays on my knee showed a good amount of car­ti­lage which was promis­ing news. Dr. Schae­fer still gave me an exam­i­na­tion and told me that my left patel­la and left ankle were both very loose joints. I agreed with him and told him about my his­to­ry of turn­ing the ankle and both patel­lar dis­lo­ca­tions. The good news from this is that as I age and my joints stiff­en, these joints will become less wig­gly. An “advan­tage” of aging. In the mean­time, I’m to con­tin­ue rid­ing my bike and being as active as I want, ignor­ing the pain and let­ting any swelling be my guide to over-exer­tion. More good news.

He decid­ed to take anoth­er x‑ray from a dif­fer­ent angle, to get a look in between my patel­la and knee joint. This was done prompt­ly and it was dis­cov­ered that I have a menis­cal ossi­cle, basi­cal­ly a loose chip of bone float­ing around in there. That’s what’s like­ly been caus­ing my pain. There’s noth­ing to be done apart from try­ing to make my legs even stronger (and going to a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist to get some exer­cis­es) and start tak­ing glu­cosamine sul­fate (not chon­droitin) to improve my joint health.

I was leery of the glu­cosamine stuff since it costs the earth, but the doc­tor sug­gest­ed I get it from… Wal-Mart. I was even more leery of this, but my knee hurts so much I went shop­ping. At Wal­green’s a two-month sup­ply of 2,000mg glu­cosamine sul­fate would cost me $120. It was about the same at Rite Aid. Tar­get does­n’t car­ry it. So I went to Wal-Mart. I got a three-month sup­ply of 2,000mg glu­cosamine sul­fate for $13. It was almost worth the near ago­ra­pho­bic melt­down that Wal-Mart engen­ders.