{"id":8274,"date":"2014-12-27T22:31:28","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T06:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=8274"},"modified":"2017-06-08T20:52:12","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T03:52:12","slug":"catching-up-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2014\/12\/27\/catching-up-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Catching Up, Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took me long enough to get to “Part 3” of the “Catching Up” series that there will likely need to be a “Part 4”, and possibly even a “Part 5”, in order to get back up-to-date. Timely journal entries are apparently not my thing. The last entry covered Scare the Children 2014<\/a>, and this one gets us through the beginning of November when I went into the hospital for my first-ever surgery.<\/p>\n

First, some history: back in 2011 I was running a lot<\/a> and getting back into good shape, then in August of that year I felt a crunch in my knee while on the treadmill and wasn’t able to run again without my knee swelling up to impressive size. I went in to Kaiser, my insurance provider at the time, and told them I had probably torn something in my knee. I gave them my running history, let them know that I had experienced several minor injuries over the years and knew the difference between soreness and something more serious, and then waited to see if an X-ray would be sufficient of if they would need to schedule an MRI. Apparently neither was in the cards: despite my protestations that something was very wrong I was sent home with instructions to ice the knee and take aspirin. Combined with previous bad experiences, that was the last time I ever went to Kaiser.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as a self-employed person, I was in a position where I could not switch insurance providers without facing the dreaded “pre-existing condition” denial of coverage. While Obamacare is obviously hated by some, the law’s ban on using pre-existing conditions as a reason to deny coverage was a godsend for me, so I waited until it went into full effect on January 1, 2014, and after fighting with the Covered California<\/a> website and with the overwhelmed Anthem Blue Cross, I finally switched to insurance that allowed me to see a sports medicine doctor. I visited UCLA, was quickly scheduled for an MRI, and was diagnosed with a torn meniscus. Apparently the normal protocol is to try to resolve such things via physical therapy, but despite a few months of twice-weekly visits and lots of exercises I was never able to run more than two miles without having knee pain the following day.<\/p>\n

By the time it was clear that physical therapy wasn’t going to resolve things it was too close to the 2014 World Tour<\/a> to schedule surgery, but shortly after returning home from Africa I met with one of the best knee surgeons on the West Coast and made an appointment to get sliced up. At 6:30AM on November 4 Audrey took me into the hospital, and an hour later an anesthesiologist told me “c’mon, take a deeper breath than that”. An hour after that my eyes opened, and then they wheeled me out of the hospital. Two days later I was walking, and as of last week I’ve been given clearance to try running again on a limited basis. Christmas day Aaron and I went for a short run around the neighborhood, and so far the knee has remained its normal size. Since pounding concrete sidewalks hurt my knees even before the meniscus tear I’m waiting for our treadmill to be repaired before trying to run again, but for the first time in over three years I’m cautiously optimistic that I may yet be able to resume the only sport I was ever good at.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took me long enough to get to “Part 3” of the “Catching Up” series that there will likely need to be a “Part 4”, and possibly even a “Part 5”, in order to get back up-to-date. Timely journal entries are apparently not my thing. The last entry covered Scare the Children 2014, and this … Continue reading “Catching Up, Part 3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,56],"class_list":["post-8274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-recap","tag-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8274"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8318,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8274\/revisions\/8318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}