On Wednesday I saw my orthopedic surgeon for a consult on my right knee. It's been a bad knee since my mid-20's (I've had two arthroscopic surgeries on it, one at age 30 and a second at age 33 - both when I was at a healthy weight). Carrying around an extra 120+ pounds for over two decades certainly didn't help, and losing 126 pounds didn't cure the long-standing issues. We're trying a series of three injections (Euflexxa) to see if they will help, but if they don't, I'll be scheduling a total knee replacement for the first week in August.
It's hard to know what kind of shape my knee would be in today had I maintained a healthy weight over the years. I know that the massive amount of extra weight that I carried contributed to the deterioration of the joint as the doctor told me that with every step we take, the pressure on our knees is four times our body weight. Yikes! While walking around at 260+ pounds, I never factored in the toll that weight was taking on my joints.
That was the problem . . . I didn't receive regular updates from my body letting me know what was happening inside. It would be nice to have a series of gauges we could check to see what's happening, wouldn't it? Our cars have gauges that tell us how much gas we have, what our tire pressure is, if the oil level is down - we watch those gauges and respond as needed because we don't want to wait until a red light starts flashing on our dash.
The only monitors we have about our health are the lab reports we get periodically, but even our blood work and other lab tests only tell part of the story. We are fairly clueless about anything else unless we have symptoms - but those symptoms are the flashing red lights on our body's dashboard. By the time symptoms appear, things have already gone wrong.
What's wonderful is that losing weight can shut down many of these flashing lights - cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar levels often return to normal, diabetes can be managed (sometimes even reversed). The list of health benefits goes on and on!
Unfortunately, sometimes the accumulative damage from years of obesity cannot be reversed, and that is certainly true when it comes to my knee. That poor knee was forced to support a lot more weight than it was ever intended to carry for far too many years and the damage has been done.
The good news is that losing 126 pounds and getting healthy ended up buying me time with my knee. For most of the past 3-1/2 years, the knee has been tolerable (with the help of periodic cortisone injections). Losing weight and staying active has helped and I'm thankful for that! The other good news is that I AM healthy, so if I end up needing surgery in August, I'll go into surgery in good shape. I shudder to think about the possibility of undergoing surgery weighing 260! In fact, I know that if I hadn't lost weight, I would have probably already been forced to have a knee replacement and I would have had it as a morbidly obese diabetic - a very scary thought! I'm so thankful I made the decision to get healthy and then made daily choices needed to not only reach my goal but maintain a healthy weight!
Making the choice to stay on plan today is about far more than just how we will look and feel a few months from now. Today's choices will impact our body in ways we may not realize for years to come. Choose wisely :-)
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