J M Wetherington Sr

Last week was a lot of fun.

It actually started the weekend before, on Friday, January 24th. Out of nowhere, my left knee suddenly became very painful and slightly swollen. I didn’t have any injury or make any movement that might cause trauma to it, but there it was deciding to cause me pain when I bent it to sit down or unbent it to stand up.

It kept getting worse over the weekend. Pain levels went way up and so did the swelling. My knee looked like a balloon being blown up from the inside. Cindy kept urging me to go to a doctor but I thought (and hoped) it would just go away.

But it didn’t.

By Monday morning I was in a bad way. I hadn’t been able to sleep much Saturday or Sunday nights because I kept being awakened by pain if I moved my left leg into any position other than stretched straight out. I tried Extra Strength Tylenol, Salon Pas roll-on pain reliever, CBD oil (my knee got SO high, lol) and even Aleve, which I’m not supposed to take due to kidney issues. Nothing was relieving the pain.

And I’m sure I was becoming even more of a pain to live with than I normally am.

So I finally relented Monday morning and agreed to visit a nearby “Urgent Care” (such false advertising) clinic. Cindy took care of getting me registered online and an appointment set for 11:30 am. Then it kept getting set back via text messages until finally they settled on 12:30 pm. The very first thing they did when I arrived was get my money, of course. Then we waited another two hours in the waiting area before I was finally called back to an “intake” room. While sitting in the waiting room I noticed my left knee felt very hot to the touch. Not just warm, but actually hot.

Keep in mind that when I arrived at 12:30 I was number three in line according to their app. By the time I reached number one in line it was 1:30 pm and we watched five other people be called back during the hour from 1:30 to 2:30 when I was “Number One” in line. What a joke.

And yes, I get that people with more “urgent” needs can and will be moved ahead of the line. But not one of those 5 people appeared to be in physically worse condition or more pain than I was. No eyeballs hanging out of sockets, no arms dangling by a thread of muscle, no gurneys, wheelchairs or crutches. They were obviously people that were probably also told they were “Number One” in line, just like me, as the clinic tried to clear out their backlog.

The intake nurse, after we exchanged words about how they kept me waiting 2 hours past my appointment time, asked me “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain level?” I told her a seven. Cindy raised her eyebrow at me but said nothing.

Once I got in the exam room things moved quickly. My “physician” was actually a Nurse Practitioner. I don’t have a problem with that. Most nurses, in my opinion, seem more in touch with folks than physicians do and usually know as much as a physician. And Nurse Practitioners are qualified to deal with patients on their own He quickly explained I had fluid build-up on my knee, possibly from arthritis, and that it was infected. Thus the swelling and the heat. I was prescribed 4 different medicines and, after Cindy asked for one, a knee brace. One of the medicines was a steroid, so he warned me my blood sugar levels would shoot up higher than usual during the 5 days I would be taking that one.

At 2:45 we were out the door and headed to the pharmacist. Three hours of waiting, two of those in the waiting room, and it was all over in 15 minutes.

Afterward, as we drove back to Nomad, Cindy said to me, “Why did you say seven? You’ve been in a lot of pain. I would have thought you would say ten.”

Here’s my feeling on pain levels. To me, on a scale of one to ten, ten would be I’ve passed out from the pain. Just completely unable to handle it. Nine would be me curled into a fetal position in absolute agony. Too exhausted by the pain to even do more than groan or whimper. Eight would be me screaming in excruciating misery. Hurting so bad that I would have to release it in shouts of torment. Seven would be (and was at the moment) me in constant torture and ready to lose whatever small amount of cool I may have had. Thus me verbally biting off the head of the intake nurse.

So, on a scale of one to ten, seven was my level at the time.

I was still in pain on Tuesday and Wednesday, though I could feel it was decreasing. As was the swelling and the heat in my knee. Spent a lot of time with my leg elevated and off of it. Cindy was waiting on me hand and foot. I messed up on Tuesday by feeling like I was good enough to walk in sand on the beach. Big mistake. So Tuesday afternoon and night I paid for that mistake with incredible soreness and pain. By Thursday, after staying off my leg completely, I was much, much better and by Friday I was only feeling small, occasional twinges of pain if I kept the knee bent too long.

And, of course, the moral of the story is; listen to your wife when she urges you to get medical treatment, lol!