Knee news is good news...

(Sort of...)

The young folk went off into town after breakfast. JR and I went to the gym, then JR prepared tonight’s meal. (Which was yummy, btw.)

But the main, epic, news is that I finally had an appointment with the knee surgeon, Mr Mc. I always feel relatively healthy at the hospital - the outside entrance is full of sick looking people in slippers and dressing gowns, smoking. And there are so many overweight people. And that's just the staff!

I had to wait an hour at the hospital, but I was in the quiet waiting room, not the one with 'Magic Radio' being beamed out through a tv monitor for our 'enjoyment'.

Mr Mc apologised for keeping me waiting, but I told him I'd been waiting many months, so another half hour didn’t matter.

I was very impressed. He was so professional, asked good questions, tested all my knee movements, enquired after my medical history (I kept forgetting bits and adding them in as we went along - I have so much). I mentioned my breathlessness, and later, I mentioned my PE (blood clot on my lungs) of a few years ago and he said, 'That's what's causing it!'

Anyway, he's worried about the inflammation shown in the blood test months ago (funnily enough, the GP wasn’t at all bothered...) and wants to get to the bottom of that. I may have an infection in the knee, or he suggested another couple of possibilities. He's got a list of things he's testing. Yay! Something is being done at last! And all this because I happened to bump into my knee surgeon at the gym, and he said to get in touch with his nurse. Otherwise the GPs would just still be handing me different 'pain killers' and saying, 'I don’t know what else to do.' Mr Mc admitted pain killers don’t have much effect on knee pain.

Mind you, he said that about 9% of knee operations in Edinburgh aren’t 'successful', and about 20% UK wide (or was it world wide...) Fingers crossed I'm not one of those poor folk.

An autumny photo today by JR.