The continuing saga of my knees

I’ve not mentioned my knees for a while, so I thought it was about time to address that.

As previous posts and some tweets will have explained I’ve been suffering with a particularly painful left knee. It’s been wrong for a couple of years but the pain has been manageable, that was until the end of May when I was walking up a hill with @PilgrimChris and the knee just exploded into pain and has been almost impossible to walk on ever since. I managed to get an appointment with a specialist and surgery was scheduled.

In the meantime I’ve been gaining weight and losing fitness at a dreadful rate, so I’ve been trying to do short walks and last weekend I went to the Dales again, with Chris again and tried to do a relatively short walk up Littondale. This didn’t go too well, although I had a great time, the walking was really painful and we cut the weekend short in the end.

My initial consultation suggested that there was an 18 week waiting list for the operation, which put me around the end of January somewhere. A couple of weeks later I received a letter offering me a date of the 29th October! I was elated and that was partly responsible for throwing caution to the wind and heading to the Dales to see how much walking I could actually do on a bad knee.

I came home and sulked for a day or two, consoling myself with the fact that I only had a few weeks to wait rather than a few months. Then today I got a phone call from the surgical unit offering me a cancellation slot next Wednesday! I’m on a high again, I can hardly stop smiling and my feet are quite literally getting itchy.

I’ve spent the afternoon dreaming about long weekend walks and trying to calculate when I think I’ll be able to walk properly again; up the hills rather than around the house.

I have a week booked with my brother on Skye in early December and I had been thinking I would be limited to short walks from the croft we’re staying in, but now I’m thinking of taking ice axe and crampons and wondering what hills I can visit.

I can hardly believe that the news has had such a physical effect on me – I had been contemplating a winter of being stuck in the house, idly killing time while I waited. Now I’m hoping for a winter of fine weather and some good walking and getting fit for a long distance walk next year!

Keep an eye open on the 15th October – I’ll try and tweet updates as I go; signal and hospital rules permitting.