sticks,
My knees have never really been my strong point and a few tumbles while dismounting from my bike, have made them a damn sight worse.
I can walk unaided, but it is so much better with a stick – and my walking is strictly limited to that which is strictly necessary. Which sometimes means that I don’t even reach the unambitious target (set by my smartwatch) of 3,000 steps a day.
The process of my future care is now slotted into The System and that will grind its inexorable way forward, although given the pandemic, the number of untreated cases of wonky knees is probably in the tens of thousands, and the medical mills grind slow.
My prescriptions have changed, but only to give me better pain killers, which the doctor has suggested I use with caution – which makes you wonder just what drug they are derived from! I have done without pain killers up until now and I can stumble my way onwards without them. Hopefully.
A blood test has been set up for me and another appointment with the doctor to see exactly what is happening and then, who knows?
There was a horror story of a guy in the UK who needed to have a back tooth taken out and who searched for an NHS dentist to do the job. He couldn’t find one locally, and after some fifty phone calls to increasingly distant practitioners, he eventually found one who suggested that the earliest appointment he could have would be THREE YEARS DISTANT!
Perhaps this is one of those instant urban myths that flourish in straitened times, but I am sure that I read about it in the Guardian, and since I put all of my faith into the probity of that newspaper, it gives you a mighty pause for thought.
I have to say that the medical treatment that I have had in Catalonia has been exemplary and my doctor has been essential to my well-being. But there is only so much that a local health centre can do. Operations on the knee are well outside their remit.
It is at this point that I remember my father. He too had problems with his knees, but his problems came after a career as a PE teacher and playing professional Rugby League. I really have to hunt around to find reasons for my knee problems, and I don’t think that a few nasty tumbles from the bike explains everything.
Dad was told that he would have to have an operation but, even in those days, there were waiting lists and he would have to go on being in pain, waiting for a bed to become available.
In spite of his socialist beliefs, he eventually listened to his surgeon who told him, “If you have a private consultation with me, I will be able to recommend you to one of ‘my’ beds in the hospital and then the operation will be done on the National Health.” My father paid the fifteen guineas for the consultation, with the surgeon, which was obviously just a form of words, he was given a bed and was operated on, basically by jumping the queue. Dad was in pain, and he couldn’t walk. The NHS should have been able to deal with his condition but, we do not live in an ideal world, and the fifteen guineas was money well spent.
When I find out exactly what is wrong with my ‘disaster area’ knees and what the specialist suggests needs to be done about them, then I will have to look at the possibilities and what is going to work for me.
So far, the Catalan health service has been brilliant and has fully justified my faith in it. My knees might pose a problem that will need a little more than faith to sort them out. We will see.
