This is my knee...

[Warning: The post contains a bare naked knee.]

This is it:

Pretty great knee, eh? I have another one that is much less fetching, having had 27 stitches sunk into it once when I  took an unfortunate plunge through a broken dock. With a rusty nail.

[Ewww!]

Back to the good knee. Here it is at some point last year, dressed up for a day on the town in Toronto:

Sorry about the blurry foot. [Pic was actually taken to demo Very Cool New Skull Scarf].


Regardless, this knee has a secret. It just LOOKS like a good knee. In truth, inside this perfectly functional-looking joint is a torn meniscus. The medial meniscus, if you want to get technical. I tore it last summer, August 20th, to be exact, taking a gazelle-like sideways leap across an embarrassingly low pylon in my boot-camp exercise class.

[I am going somewhere with this story....]

So, after the requisite time to allow the thing to heal, followed by the requisite denial phase, and the requisite 'I don't actually have a doctor, because the one I had moved to Vernon' phase, plus a number of pain-induced sleepless nights, I actually broke down and showed up at my friend Linda's office and asked her to have a look at it. [She is a doctor, needless to say, though not my doctor, as that would not be fair.] She told me she thought I had a torn meniscus, and sent me off to a series of experts, who all agreed with her. So did the MRI.

My friend Linda the doctor is very smart. She's also lived through a number of body-rending events with me so has learned to Expect The Worst.

As a result, there hasn't been much running done lately, by the knee you see pictured above. I'm scheduled for surgery sometime fairly soon to have the torn stuff scraped out.

But I digress.

Because this is my meniscus and not an ACL or other more important ligament, I can still do the elliptical trainer at the gym and swim and so on.

And yet, I fear. I fear the encroaching portliness. The avoirdupois. I fear becoming my other friend Norma's new favourite word, which happens to be zaftig. Also, you may not have noticed, but my particular profession requires a certain amount of sitting and typing, which when combined with the lack of running in my life, may lead to same.

No more.

[At last -- she gets to the point!]

All this to say, I have just set up a treadmill desk in my office. Not only that, but I've put a file on my desktop titled LIVE WRITER WALKING so I can record my progress [if any]. I tried it today for the first time with pretty decent success. Walked for an hour and a half at 2 km an hour [which is slightly over the recommended speed, but I couldn't get my rhythm at 1.6 km/hr...so 2 it was.] I actually forgot to record the distance, but according to the machine I managed to burn [and my guess is this is very approximate] 254 calories, which is likely a few more than I would have burned with my posterior in my desk chair.

Will keep you appraised of progress. Am thinking of walking across Canada for fun. Why not?

In other [more writerly] news, my friend Marsha Skrypuch has just opened registration for her summer Brantford Writing Workshop. You can find the details on her blog HERE. I can't recommend this camp enough -- if you are in the Brantford/Toronto region and have some time this summer -- THIS is the place to be.


And to finish, make sure you check THIS out - some amazing pictures of the paralympic Games, just about to wrap up here in Vancouver. The inspiration I get from watching these athletes is hard to measure. They are incredible!

Enjoy. I've got some walking to do...

~kc