29 and the Plum

Bike Time: 13 minutes

Distance: meh

I have a plum inside my knee cap. If my knee were a jelly doughnut, instead of having jelly inside, mine has a plum. (I am assuming this plum is some form of swelling and excess fluid. Plum sounds better to me.) When I bend my knee/jelly doughnut, it feels like the plum is going to explode. I really don't want it to explode. It doesn't hurt, as plums can't feel pain. It does cause the rest of my knee/jelly doughnut some discomfort. The plum has been there for about five days. I am kind of starting to hate it. It hangs out at the flexion point of about 30 degrees* which means it pops up when I bend my leg to walk. Evan, my physical therapist, is trying to get me to correct my gait so I walk like a normal person and not like a peg-legged pirate. The plum is blocking my knee from bending which in turn prevents me from having a normal gait. I am afraid if I bend my knee too much, plum sauce will explode all over the gym. I imagine taking a kitchen towel and cleaning it up, as if it were a sweet sauce instead of the inside of my knee.

Yesterday when I was riding the stationary bike (not to be confused with "biking" which means ride a bike on a real road outside), my knee popped and I thought the plum had defeated my jelly doughnut, and broke free from its oppression. I kind of freaked out and thought "This can't be good." I feared the plum might have taken out the screws that were holding my new ACL in place.

I texted Jack who was out skiing with the kids. He replied if I pulled out the screws, I'd be in pain. He said if I did tear something, I'd like be unstable. So far, none of that has happened. Riding a stationary bike is supposed to be safe and beneficial. Moving my knee is theoretically supposed to shrink the plum to perhaps the size of a grape or get rid of it all together. But I am always aware of the freak accident and the things that happen outside of the norm.

Looking at the bleak side, it would be incredibly depressing to mess up my knee four weeks after the surgery. Recovering from an ACL repair is a long slog. Do I want to be left home alone every weekend in the winter for the next five years while Jack and the kids ski? I want my knee fixed not so much because I want to ski; rather, I don't want to be left home alone because I am an invalid. I'd like to have the chance to join them. I have one friend who has had two ACL repairs that were almost two decades apart. She was glad enough she had the first one fixed to go through it again to have the second one fixed. She completely knew what she was getting into with the second one. Not many people (thank god!) would have that experience. Nevertheless, I just want to move forward in all of this, not backwards.

* I am making a wild guess here.

+ + + + 

Twenty-nine is now my least favorite number. I used to not think much of twenty-nine before, it was just sort of there--nothing special, noting bad. Charlie, my kindergarten friend, used to ask our teacher, Mrs. Newkirk, how old she was.

"Twenty-nine and holding," she'd say. That was my first experience with twenty-nine. It is a good age, perhaps the perfect age.

Now I hate it. I have to do three reps of thirty legs lifts several times a day as part of my physical therapy. I can do an infinite number of leg lifts when I don't count. "But how do you know how many you can do if you don't count?" you ask. Trust me--I know. I was once doing leg lifts while watching The Bletchley Circle and I did legs lifts for ten minutes. If it takes three seconds per leg lift, that is about two hundred leg lifts. Even if I were to slack off and take five seconds a leg lift, that would be 120 leg lifts.

The problem is when I get to twenty-nine. There is something psychologically awful about it, and my leg gets tired thinking about it. It knows it is close to the end of the line, but not quite. Please stop, my leg says. I do one more, and rest for about ten seconds and start on my second rep. When I start with "one," my leg is perfectly happy when twelve seconds prior it was having a cow. Seriously leg? Are you a toddler or a dog that can so easily be tricked? What's up?

I remember when the Boy was just over a year old. He was complaining he wanted two cookies when he already had one. Jack and I were trying to explain to him that he could only have one when Claire Adele came up, took the cookie out of his hand, broke it in two, and gave it back to him. Problem solved. He toddled happily away. Jack and I were dumbfounded.

"He wanted one for each hand," Claire Adele, then four years old, said.

My leg is like the Boy when he was one. The same cookie broken in half made him happier than when it was whole. Using the same bad logic, the twenty-ninth leg lift doesn't bother my left leg when she don't know it is the twenty-ninth leg lift. Logic fails when emotions are involved.

I told Claire Adele about my problem and how I dislike twenty-nine.

"Trying counting backwards," she said. "Or in French. When I have to keep track something I don't like, I count in Japanese."

Of course. I should have asked her first.