Crunch!

It's amazing how one simple action can bring your world to a screeching halt. One minute you're minding your own business, planting flowers and the next you're on the ground looking at upside down trees and wondering where that screaming is coming from.

Oh, wait. That's me. And what sounded like someone snapping celery stalks was my knee. Again.

You see, I know this drill all too well. The explosion goes off with a pain that cannot be described (Sorry, ladies. Natural child birth doesn't hold a candle to this.). When you can see straight again, you might have someone drive you to Urgent Care, sit for an hour, have x-rays taken, sit for another hour~all in a paper gown that is 40 sizes too big for an elephant. Only to have an ER resident look at the films and proclaim with fascination, "Wow. You have almost no cartiledge left in your knee." In the end, you will discover that it is called a patella subluxation, which is just a fancy word for dislocating your knee cap, and that there is not a thing they can do but tell you to go home and ice it.

As this is the sixth time this has happened in the last four years, my drill is a little different. After the crunch (this time from jumping on the spade trying to dig a hole) and the subsequent yelling and seeing stars, I eventually dragged myself inside where I will be stuck until next Thursday with my knee elevated and under ice packs. I will take inordinate amounts of Ibuprofen and my children will take advantage of my immobility by making me watch every idiotic animated movie they own. Every day I will hobble around a little too much and the muscles and ligaments that have been stretched in directions that they were never intended to stretch will get mad at me. But by Friday I will probably risk a drive to the chiropractor where she will shake her head at me and put everything back where it belongs~ which will hurt ever so much, but which is unavoidable if this is to get better.

And someday I'm going to get a new knee. But until then, I'd better start taking the glucosamine again. How sad that I can't lug laundry baskets right now.