Midsommar Most Heat Moon
Organ recital: Kate does not have throat cancer. Didn’t know that was what Dr. James Chain, an ENT, was thinking until he eliminated the idea yesterday. Nothing quite like dodging the metaphorical bullet you didn’t even hear fired. Her sense of smell, adumbrated, and her sense of taste, flattened, however, may not return. Tough for weight loss. If food doesn’t taste-bad or good, it’s not appealing. We’re working right now to figure out what she can taste so we can emphasize them in our menu choices and cooking.
My knee. Well, in short, nothing wrong. Dr. Peace, he of the elfin ears and round face, said, “Ligaments feel good, strength is good. You have more flexibility than 90% do at this point. You’re good.” Kate asked, “Can he kneel to weed?” “Oh, yes.” Me, “Oh, no.” This because I have significant pain when I kneel on my left knee. “For some reason,” Dr. Peace said, “50% of knee replacement patients report pain on kneeling. 50% don’t. We don’t know why.” Oh.
Dr. Peace says that short of blunt force trauma: ski accident, automobile crash, a bad fall I can’t hurt the prosthetic. “It’s designed for you to be active.” That’s good news because it means I can challenge it as much as I can stand.
It was my knee prosthetic’s moment on the big screen. The x-ray screen. In scales of gray and white I could see the anchoring bolt dug deep into my tibia and the large lunette window shaped chunk attached somehow to my femur. Glue was mentioned. Say what? Most weird of all though, my knee cap floated free, a sort of slightly flattened disc which looked as if it wanted distance from the rest of this oh so necessary joint.
In short, good news all round. We celebrated with a meal at RICE Sushi and Bistro not far from Dr. Chain’s office. The temperature was a Minnesotan frying 95 degrees, but as we climbed the mountains of the Front Range we got down to a more bearable 77 at home.
