Fun with magnets

So yesterday was fun...

Spent the morning in an MRI machine having my knees scanned. Surprising how cozy an experience it can be, having the atoms in your body spun around and shot at with high frequency radio waves. I spent most of the 40 minutes drifting in and out of a near sleep state. I could understand maybe only 2 out of every 10 words spoken by the technician, but how difficult is it to understand, "lie there and don't move". And it was very comforting to be wrapped in this big white tube of empirical certainty.

On the other hand, my knees are kind of f*cked...

I went in because my left knee has been quite verbose lately, clicking out a little tap every time I take a step. I figured when your knee starts talking, it's probably trying to tell you something. But I decided to also have my right knee looked at. I hurt it several years ago snowboarding (actually during one of my visits here, pre-move) and since it happened during one of my several gaps in health insurance coverage (ah, the joys of freelancing in America...) I somehow neglected to ever have a MRI taken of it. I knew it was a pretty bad injury and it seemed to never quite heal properly. It has a tendency to give way when I put weight on it from a certain angle, it just buckles. Kind of a drag on stairs.


Well, as it turns out the left knee is slightly damaged, a little tear in the meniscus. But the snowboarding injury in the right knee, that one snapped one of the cruciate ligaments.


This is the left knee, basically fine.


But the right one is just a gnarled mess.

We're still figuring out what to do. The injury is old, and I've basically learned how to live with it. But dang! it's nasty looking in there.

On the other hand, because Japan has such good national health care, it only cost me $60 to take a look.