My Right Knee

My right knee has disintegrated again! Three days ago. I wasn't doing very much; just attaching the canopy to the sun-lounger while chatting to my friend Jim who was standing at the garden gate. If it had happened the previous day I would have been less surprised. I had been cutting grass and strimming for several hours, clearing the little footbridge near the house which gets so overgrown. But, no, it just happened as I was shuffling sideways around the lawn, laughing and joking with Jim. A sudden pain on the inside of the joint and a sensation of something exploding up into the muscles in the front of my right thigh.

Ah, dear reader, (are there any?) I sense your surprise. How can this be, you ask (well, you might not ask, I suppose, but I'm going to tell you anyway - that's the price you pay for reading these things!) You see, I have had the inside compartment of my right knee replaced twice now. The first time being just over two years ago and, the second, almost exactly one year later. It exploded then, and, I suppose because it was the first time anything had exploded inside my right leg, it was very much more painful on that first occasion.

Ok, I see I'm going to have explain this in more depth. There are three components to the device my friendly orthopaedic surgeon first implanted into me knee two years ago. One upper metal component which is attached to the bottom surface of my right humerus, another metal component attached to the upper surface of my tibia, and between them, a free floating plastic bearing. What has gone wrong, on two occasions now, is that the upper component becomes loose, things get out of alignment, and the plastic bearing is popped out of the joint like a tiddly-wink. It has nowhere to go except up into the muscles on the front of my thigh, at a rapid rate of knots!

The result ------ pain (tho' far less on this second occasion) and an inability to put weight on that leg. Now I have to wait until my consultant friend can operate once again. and that might be some time as he is presently incapacitated through injury. This time he will replace the whole joint and there will be far less risk of subsequent failure.

Thus I am left, for the time being, just able to hobble a few steps at a time with the help of a stick. Rather frustrating, as I was enjoying this beautiful summer, the first of my retirement, but there it is!

The First

For my first entry I copy something I wrote last week , the day after terrible bombings in London. The tone will lighten after that, I hope.

We were expecting yesterday. We have been expecting it for several years now. We suspect it is not over and there is more to come.That expectation does not make it any easier to know that there are so many lives devastated by injury and loss this morning. That expectation did mean that our police and emergency services were ready for the moment. Lives have been saved that would have been lost, and injuries made less because of their actions. However, the fact remains. That expectation has not helped to make today any easier to bear, as we count the cost.

What does make it easier, and gives us strength, are the expressions of sympathy and support received from our friends abroad, Thank you all, it means more than we can express.

Personally, I feel no hatred against the actual perpetrators. Men, probably young, who have been misled by manipulative leaders to behave in this way, and led to believe that this was an answer to the deprivations of their people. It is the manipulative old men, who use religion to their own ends, and who send their young to their deaths so callously for whom I reserve my hatred and scorn.

We cannot pretend we are not wounded and suffering, but it is a suffering that will only strengthen our fortitude to defeat this evil which stalks us. In some ways, it is an evil we have brought upon ourselves, but that makes it no less evil. It will not prevail.
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