Not Ready for a Trade...Yet

I have to have knee surgery.  I am nearly 58.  Well, I guess that's pretty good - getting this far without having to have some joint repair, discounting of course, the shot in the shoulder and weeks of physical therapy for that pain.  Unfortunately, it reminds me every day that it is not fixed.  I guess that's what happens as we age - the joints and other parts get 'rusty' and go bad.  They just don't work like they used to.

This knee thing though really has me sidelined - and I am not looking forward, in the least, to either the repair or the after-pain, mostly because I already know how bad it hurts now.  I can't imagine how bad it's going to hurt next weekend after the doc pokes holes in my joint, fills it full of fluid and shaves off the ripped meniscus that keeps me in pain now.  I don't know what bothers me most, the current pain, the idea of the actual procedure, or the fact that part of my body (again) is going to be removed and will not be replaced.  What this will leave in its place, hopefully, will be a recovery of joint use without pain, but the very likely occurrence of later arthritic joint pain simply because this part is now gone.

Seems like a lose-lose proposition to me.

Let me get this right.  You are going to put me in further pain to get rid of pain, and having done this will likely cause me further pain down the road.

I am scratching my head.

So this is what aging is all about.

The other day after I got the news about what was going to happen during this procedure, I made the girls in the doc's office laugh a bit when I likened myself to a used car.  I told them for years that it was simply a lube, oil, and filter - and that was all I needed to be good to go for another 3-5 thousand miles. Now it seems, I am stopping every five hundred for the lube job.  More bothersome though, is that I now have to repair, replace, or remove the parts.  First it was the hysterectomy (okay, we can live without the radio).  Then it was the gall bladder (alright, so now we have to use the keys to lock the car and not the auto lock).  So, I guess repairing the knee is like repairing the clutch.  You need the clutch to drive - otherwise the car won't move.  Duh.

I really don't want to think about what could be next...as long as it's not the drive train.

I guess it's still cheaper than trading it in on a new model!

So, until the whole machine quits, I guess I'll keep repairing or replacing the parts, lubing the joints, and filling the tank.  Maybe I will even use high test now and again to get a kick out of the day. And I may not drive as fast, but I will keep driving because this model still has lots of miles left.