At the CSW XML Summer School, there was a rock night featuring a number of Summer School speakers and attendees in the band. I decided dancing was more my style (I sing, but my voice is better suited to different music). And then I managed, part-way through the evening, to damage my knee. It was still hurting a lot in the morning, so I decided that I should get it checked out.
So there we were in the summer school office, me calling the travel insurance company and Natasha calling local doctors, to find the appropriate place. They all ended up converging on recommending one of the local hospitals with an orthopaedic department, so off we went.
My impression overall was good. At 10 am on a Wednesday morning the hospital was almost empty so service was relatively fast; the form-filling system was extremely inefficient with lots of redundant information (e.g., name of the country you come from as well as a code for the country you come from which was looked up on a paper list). The care was free (which the travel insurance didn’t know; they were surprised when I called back later and said I didn’t need to pay anything). The hospital looked new with lots of natural light and trees in pots and a photo-montage of the 11 moon phases during the lunar month. And then a pinboard with ads for the organ donor registry (it appears to have been “National Transplant Week”) and brochures with titles like “Buddhism and Organ Donation” covering the major religious beliefs (Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hindu Dharma).
The knee was pronounced to be in need of time to heal but no surgery; a relief after my previous arthroscopy experience on the other knee. The interesting thing was that the resident told me to take maximum doses of both paracetamol (the UK version of acetaminophen) and ibuprofen. Jenni Tennison (whose father is a doctor) told me this is common in the UK as the two pain killers have different effects and work on different schedules, so taking both helps in controlling the pain.
Almost 6 weeks later, after physiotherapy every week back home in Vancouver, the knee is almost completely back to normal. My physio told me, once the swelling had subsided enough to actually be able to judge, that I’d sprained my knee rather than tearing cartilage. So that was the good news. And going back to Pilates after their summer break will help as well.
It’s funny, the way you learn things about the body only when you have some reason to. Like the fact that many women are knock-kneed (the root cause of my knee problems) and tend to pronation, simply because of the way the legs are connected to the hips. I guess in terms of evolution, having bad knees is not a great disadvantage.
