Kneeds

I kneed to lose weight. I kneed to walk. And now, apparently, I kneed a new knee. Crap.

It's a running joke (pun accidental) in my office at work that I am the least active of all of my fellow employees and yet I have the least amount of aches, pains, injuries, and surgeries. Marathons, biking, walking and P90X have reeked havoc on them while I have remained injury free. My husband has always been very athletic and as a consequence, he has broken a wrist, fractured an ankle, blown out a knee, thrown up after virtually ever race he has ever run, and (every one's personal favorite when they hear the story) separated his pelvis riding a mechanical bull.

Me? It's exponentially less difficult to injure yourself while laying on a couch.  I've never broken a bone. That is, until I decided to lose some weight and adopt a healthier lifestyle.

I've never been athletic, but "back in the day" I did enjoy riding a bicycle. It's so much faster than walking, and there is always a sense of reclaimed childhood when riding one. I even tried entering a bike race one time only to recognize that I have a complete lack of competive drive. As long as I rode like a kid, it was great. When I lived in Northern Utah, a friend and I used to ride our bikes 21 miles around a lake almost every morning. It was beautiful, peaceful and I really did feel good about myself. I also got ginormous thighs.

I honestly can't tell you why we stopped riding. I'm confident it wasn't because of the thighs, but I suspect I probably got pregnant or my husband's schedule changed so that he couldn't stay with the kids in the morning. As with most things that change, it's just because life happened. And as life happened, the bike got put away. It hung from the ceiling of our garage until we sold it this summer for fifty dollars. My four hundred dollar racing bike. Yeah, that's why we don't own a business.

What I didn't know was that as my husband was selling it, he was buying me a new, more practical bike for our wedding anniversary. He knew how much I loved riding a bike and how I wanted to lose some weight, but he also knew that the seat on my old bike would probably get sucked up into my behind, requiring surgery to remove it, and the skinny tires would explode the first time I mounted. Smart man.

As it turns out, that may have been more fun to watch. On my first ride around the block on my brand new bike, I popped my tailbone. No accident, no trauma, nothing dramatic at all. I got on the bike and broke my butt (and no junior high jokes here about the fact that it was already cracked...). Luckily we were able to sell that bike for just less than we paid for it. In the end, I couldn't help but think about how uninjured I'd been all those years on the couch.

This incident happened right before our anniversary trip to Grand Cayman and it was there, on the beach, that I realized that I really and absolutely needed to get some weight off. Though the doctor said my weight had nothing to do with the coccyx fracture, I secretly believe that every single ailment and life challenge I have can be directly traced to my weight. I forget that there are a lot of sick, skinny people out there. And LOTS of skinny, injured athletes. What do skinny people blame when they get sick or injured?

About now you may be asking yourself what all this bike talk has to do with my knee? I've had intermittent knee pain over the last several years and I was told that biking was an excellent exercise because it had little impact on my knee. So I tried biking again and look where it got me...back to walking. Walking reminded me that my knee hurt so I finally went to an orthopaedic doctor and he told me I have osteoarthritis, that I'm bone-to-bone on my right knee, and the only solution is a total knee replacement, something they don't like to do until you're around 65. So what does the ortho recommend to help hold it off for more than ten years? Biking. Aaaaaaaaaaargh!!!

I've been able to ride a recumbent stationery bike without much pain or discomfort so I'm trying to see the whole coccyx incident as a fluke. We'll see how that goes when I get my new bike with the giant, oversized seat like the doc recommended. The other option he offered was swimming, so it looks like I'm back in black swimsuits, conquering the water as the Princess of Whales. If you hear screams coming from Sand Hollow Aquatic, it's just the small children when Ursula slithers into the water with her broken butt and bad knee.

I kneed a break...