16 Oct 2022 4:34 am
You are wrong, mine came from years earlier as a form carpenter & years of carrying tool bags, 1 full of 16 penny nails, used to easily & quickly remove the nails from the 2 x 4 braces holding the plywood holding the newly poured concrete for the columns built to support the coming deck above.
I was standing on the 3rd level of scaffolding as we were building the Pacheco Sewage Treatment Plant on my 1st day on the job. I pushed a 2 x 12 plank over with my right foot, as I had many times before, when my knee popped out of the joint. I pushed it back in & kept working with a limp. It turned out that my partner was a union steward who at the end of the day told the job foreman, who told me to go to the company's doctor. I kept working until the job came to an end in early January, 1976. In the mean time, my left knee started hurting because I was favoring my right. When the foreman handed me my last check I told him I needed to go back to the doctor, who sent me to a surgeon. The x-rays showed torn cartilage in the right knee, but the left was too fuzzy to tell. I had the cartilage removed from the right, & 2 months later exploratory surgery on the left. Back then, they gave us meth? after the surgery to wake us from the anesthesia, so thepain was horrendous. When the doctor came in after the surgery on the left, he said he had good news & bad. Of course I asked him what the bad news was, & he said, "The cartilage wasn't torn & the good news is the same." I had 3 big scars on my left knee & both knees hurt until a few years after I had them replaced in 2014 & 2015. My orthopedic surgeon told me that the hardest part for him in replacing them would be straightening them because they were so bowed from all the years of limping.