Oh, I can lurch. And shuffle. And I can dodder and shamble. I’m very good at hobbling. I limp, and I’m getting to be an expert at tottering.
But walk normally? Not so much.
The last month hasn’t been good to me, locomotion-wise. My knees, both of them, have taken up collapsing, fortunately not at the same time. So far I haven’t actually fallen, but I’ve come very close. The collapses are unpredictable, but I’ve learned to recognize the signs and if I can shift my weight to my other leg, I can abort the whatever-it-is.
There is a lot of pain associated with these collapses. I’ve had pain in my legs ever since my hip surgery in 2019, and sometimes it’s intense and sometimes it isn’t, but the leg pain has ramped up just in the last couple weeks, and now it’s so intense that I have trouble sleeping.
And yes, I’m seeing doctors, or at any rate I have appointments with doctors, all but one in the future, because you can’t just see a doctor in New Mexico, you have to book weeks or months ahead of time. In a couple weeks one of my knees will get scanned, and that might reveal something.
But I’m only getting one knee scanned, not both. Because if I had two knees scanned, the insurance company would assume it’s fraud and refuse to pay.
But still our politicians insist we have the best medical system in the world. (Until you get sick, of course.)
We’ve canceled our trip to Scotland for adventure and Worldcon, because there’s not a lot of point in traveling all the way to another continent if you can’t walk.
So basically I can devote the next four or five months to healing, assuming my knees want to heal. We’ll see.
In more encouraging news, I finally have my eye surgery scheduled for the end of next month. Maybe after that, I’ll be able to see more out of my left eye than a kaleidoscopic blur.
My eighth decade is not beginning well.
