An Even Longer Walk

I just finished an approximately 1.4 mile walk on the road, which has much steeper hills than yesterday's walk.  My knee did very well, in fact I was tempted to go all the way to the dam.  It still objects a bit to going down a steep hill, but is doing much better.

Finished with Physical Therapy

I had my last physical therapy session today.  Another milestone in the recovery phase of my knee surgery.

Knee Surgery Update

I decided to give a progress report on my knee, just in case my other knee goes bad some day and I want to look back at my reaction to the first surgery.  I sure hope I don't have to go through another surgery, but I am so happy with the results I just might consider it again if necessary.  My only complaint at this point, 7 weeks after surgery, is that discomfort in my knee wakes me at some point each night, I think as a result of keeping it in one position for too long.  But it is just discomfort not pain.  The only pain I feel is when the PT pushes on the bent knee, trying to get just a few more degrees of bend.  But I can already bend it to 105 degrees on my own, which is pretty impressive.  The only thing I can't do is walk downstairs normally, alternating legs; that is apparently the last thing to return to normal.  There are even times during the day now when I completely forget about it and just go about my business.  I take a walk every day and can easily do a mile, which is much more than I could do before the surgery.  I can't wait to get back to aerobics class but that should probably wait until PT is done, probably at the beginning of January.

Knee Surgery

On October 5th, I had total knee replacement surgery at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.  Hence the hiatus in blog posts.  Recovery is going well, but I probably won't be doing anything blog-worthy for quite a while.

Interesting Information On Women's Health

I just read a fascinating article first published in The New Yorker in March 2000 and reproduced in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book titled "What the Dog Saw". The article is called "John Rock's Error" and the discussion begins with the birth control pill, of which John Rock was the inventor. His error was that he thought the Catholic church would see it as a "natural" means of birth control since it mimics the body's natural chemistry and they would therefore condone it - Whoops.

Interesting, but not what really caught my attention. Did you know that "Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, women of childbearing age rarely menstruated"? It makes sense, but I guess I never thought about it. Women were either pregnant or lactating - and I always felt glad I didn't have to live that life. But I never considered that might be what our bodies were designed for. What we think of as normal - frequent menses - is in evolutionary terms abnormal. And we are at a much greater risk of certain kinds of cancer because our lifestyles have changed away from that earlier "normal".

Cancer occurs when certain types of errors are introduced as cells divide. This means that any change promoting frequent cell division has the potential to increase cancer risk. And that includes ovulation, where an egg literally bursts through the ovary wall, causing the cells of the ovary to divide to heal the wound. It has been shown that each time a woman bears a child, her lifetime risk of ovarian cancer drops by 10 percent. Could this be because she stops ovulating during the pregnancy and even longer if she is breast-feeding, saving her ovaries from that excessive cell division for a year or more? And this goes for endometrial cancer as well. When a woman is ovulating, the uterine lining grows in a flurry of cell division, only to be sloughed off during menstruation if she doesn't become pregnant. "Ovarian and endometrial cancer are characteristically modern diseases, consequences, in part, of a century in which women have come to menstruate four hundred times in a lifetime." As opposed to the approximately 100 times for a healthy woman in earlier times.

The article goes on to discuss ongoing work on new birth-control measures that would reduce the number of times a women would ovulate and menstruate in a year. Sounds like a good plan.

Food Allergies

My daughter just sent this link to a fascinating article on the Mayo Clinic website on food allergies and sensitivities. I had a really itchy mouth and even some numbness after eating hazelnuts last week. It turns out that is because I am allergic to birch tree pollen, which is all around us when we are in the Adirondacks in the spring.

Here is an excerpt from the article.

"Some fresh fruits and vegetables can trigger a mild allergic reaction that causes the mouth to tingle or itch. This is an example of cross-reactivity — proteins in fruits and vegetables cause the reaction because they're similar to those allergy-causing proteins found in certain pollens. For example, if you're allergic to ragweed, you may also react to melons; if you're allergic to birch pollen, you may also react to apples. Most cooked fruits and vegetables generally do not cause cross-reactive oral allergy symptoms.
Common cross-reactivity between pollens and fruits and vegetables:

If you are allergic to:	Birch pollen	Ragweed pollen	Grasses	Mugwort pollen
You may have a reaction to:	Apples Peaches Plums Nectarines Cherries Carrots Celery Hazelnuts Almonds Raw potatoes	Melons (watermelon, cantaloupe and honeydew) Bananas Tomatoes	Melons Kiwis Tomatoes	Carrots Celery Spices

I've also reacted to apples and cherries and attributed it to residual pesticides. All that birch pollen at camp may be the culprit instead. By the way, what the heck is Mugwort?? Of course I looked it up and it is Artemisia vulgaris, a weed I'm not familiar with, at least not by that name.

Arthritis Medicine Revisited

Just to update the thoughts on the previous post on this subject. The Naprelan definitely works. I was wrong about the dosage - it is two 375 mg tablets a day, which is more than Aleve. But you would think that the inital burst of medication you get when you take an Aleve would work, versus the time-release Naprelan, and it does not work nearly as well. Plus, once I get the inflamation under control I can switch to one tablet a day of Naprelan. Just to be sure that the pain didn't just leave on its own, I stopped all medication for a couple of days. When it woke me up in the middle of the night, I made the decision to go back on Naprelan for the forseeable future. It was good to know that the Naprelan is really working on the inflammation and is not just a pain killer. If it were, the pain should have returned right away.

I am looking forward to cross-country skiing and snow-shoeing at camp next week and signed up for a line-dancing class next month :)

Arthritis Medicine

I never thought I'd be touting medication on this blog -- do you suppose I can get money from the drug company? I did our usual 4-mile walk on the boardwalk today and my hip hardly bothered me at all. I haven't been able to walk that far for several weeks. I attribute the pain reduction to the fact that I started a new medication yesterday. The doctor gave me some samples of Naprelan, which is just naproxen sodium, the same compound as in over-the-counter Aleve. Except in Naprelan, it is in a controlled-release form. I actually am taking less naproxen than I was at 2 Aleve a day, which has to be better for my stomach. But apparently the continuous release works much better at getting the inflamation down and keeping it down.

There is one caveat. When I was researching arthritis medication, I read somewhere that the following effect can come into play. Arthritis flare-ups tend to be cyclical. By the time the pain gets bad enough that the patient looks for some new type of medication, it is probably about time for the pain to subside on its own. So improvements that are attributed to the medication may actually have nothing to do with it. The timing in my case seems much too coincidental. But maybe I'll just take Aleve for the next couple of days and see what happens.