Copse and Spinney

Winnie the Pooh said “You never can tell with bees”, but truly, you never can tell with knees either.

The first time I ever really thought about knees was when I would ask my mom to play “horsey.” My brother and I would take turns; she would lie on her back, bounce me up on her knees, and we would say, “Yeehaw!” until we fell off the side and the other one of us cried out, “My turn!”

Mom‘s knees seemed inexhaustible. They were so much bigger, so much more powerful than mine. The first time I ever actually noticed my knees was when we had gone over to some of my parents’ hippie friends’ home in Austin. There was a duplex behind their backyard and a couple of college girls lived there. I came outside with banana and they called me a monkey. They were laughing at me—perhaps they thought I was cute, but I took it as they were making fun of me. They said, in their laughter, “Look at those knobby little knees.”

That was probably the last time I thought about my knees for a while, except to know that they were knobby knees. My mother even said it. But I really didn’t know what it meant.

 I didn’t think about my knees for a while, unless they were skinned. No one likes skinned knees. In the seventh grade, I was pushed on the asphalt at school and skinned both my knees at once and they bled through my nylon stockings. Such a terrible feeling having to rip off those nylons when I got home. Or perhaps in the fourth grade, when I snuck my mom’s razor and decided to shave my legs. How hard it is to get over the hills and small indentations around the kneecap. I remember as a kid, sitting on the back of my calves as if it were nothing. I didn’t even think about it, but I see it in photos—such as this photo of us feeding our goat.

I never thought my legs were beautiful. I just always thought about them being white. I would never be as tan as anyone else. “You’re so white,” my friends would say, comparing skin tones. As a teenager, I took for granted having “nice” legs, always finding fault with one thing or another, like being freckled. At this point, I didn’t really care about the knobbiness— only that they were “too white“.

You never really know what changes your knees over time. I remember that at the age of 16, I would jog a mile on every lunch break at school. Perhaps my knees were being traumatized then because I wasn’t giving them the protein that they needed. I was suffering from an eating disorder and only eating a small cucumber salad or some yogurt for my lunch break—just surviving on something minimal.

I wonder what changed the knees. I can’t track when they started to go downhill. I wonder… did it begin in my 20s when I climbed the Great Wall of China? Did it happen while I was learning to water ski?

Did it happen on so many hikes? Or bike rides? Was it because I did kickboxing in my 40s? Or just because I was an “overweight baby mama” for like 20-something years?

For whatever reason, my knees decided to give out. I went for two additional years after an MRI showed that my right knee was bone-on-bone before ultimately deciding to have knee surgery. Of course, I went through the steps they wanted me to take first: therapy, then steroid injections, then more injections—hyaluronic fluid and Iovera® treatments—only to find that my suffering had worsened.

It’s now been three weeks since my knee surgery. I won’t give you the gruesome details; you can find those on medical websites. Now, I am trying my best to keep a good face and to do the exercises I’m told, to get my sleep, and to eat my protein. The things that they don’t tell you are that it’s very hard to sleep when you have knee surgery, and they don’t tell you how hard it is to stretch out your knee. But you must do it every hour when you’re not sleeping so that you break up the scar tissue that’s trying to build up, to ensure full range of motion.

Please be good to your knees. Please don’t take them for granted. MRI shows that I’m bone-on-bone on both knees. But the left did not hurt as much. I’m really hoping that I can avoid knee surgery again, but osteoarthritis runs in the family. All my aunts have had knee replacements, but my mom and dad have not. I know a lot of folks have had knee replacements and I’m just one of the many thousands. But now, at the age of 56, I feel like I’ve endured something that only those who have had it can really understand. But Jesus—I know He understands. He is giving me grace. He is telling me things like, “You know your own body.” Those are the words I hear when I’m struggling to sleep and trying to figure out where to put the pillows to make it feel better. My dear husband keeps me on schedule with my meds and ice.

I went to my post-op, and my doctor said, “You should be teaching a class on the exercises because you’re doing so great. I wish all my patients were doing what you’re doing.” That made me feel good, but it also made me cry because each time I have pressed through the pain and the stretches, it has hurt so badly.

It’s hard to believe that only two years ago, I was hiking the tundra terrain in Colorado. I’m very proud of that moment, even though I was going at a snail’s pace, I made it to the top! We, (my husband and I) made it to the lookout point where we took pictures in the craggy rock.

This is what keeps me going because I want to do these things again. We love to hike, to visit state parks, national parks, and forests. This is what I grew up with. My dad took us to Montana when I was a kid. We went on hikes, we drank out of springs, we camped—road-tripping was our vacation time. I’m hoping that it will soon be the case again!