Free movement, now there’s a thing to strive for – or so my physiotherapist tells me – especially when it comes to knees. Free movement in the knees is invaluable in achieving all manner of things that elbows can’t do by themselves. Therefore we should all look after our knees. I’ve looked after mine but not as much as I should have done. I’ve neglected them a bit. OK, they get a bit of a going over with all this running but perhaps I could have gone the extra mile and invested in better running shoes just to show them I cared – but I have to think about my economy. And maybe I should have listened to them when they started complaining about all the tap-dancing – at my age.
However, even though they haven’t got my whole-hearted support, and at times they’ve been treated very badly, they continue to give me some sort of strength and, dare I say it, stability. They make me ‘whole’ so to speak. And even if I can read research reports in the Daily Rant and the Weekly Moan telling me that the remainder of me can manage just fine without my knees AND that having them removed would only improve my life because the knees, having neither brains nor feeling, would continue to do their work anyway – with the added bonus that I no longer have responsibility for them - I am cautious.
Even my physio, who’s all for movement, would have me believe that they’d still be there for me and that I’d never again have to think about going up the stairs “the knees will be there for you, CL”, ”your will will be their command, CL”, “there’s no pain without gain, CL” (did he really say that?)! He carefully ignores all my questions about ‘knee-length’ shorts and dismisses all my fears of how silly I’d look without knees as ‘just scaremongering’. How, without knees, I would be able to kneel down to comfort a crying child, resuscitate a dying human or even scrub the floor of the toilet, he does not know but he advises me against turning to any expert, these being under the control of the brain.
All my ‘bad hair’ days, varicose veins and failing eyesight will disappear, he adds, and shows me a newspaper report which proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my knees are to blame for these problems as well. His firm belief is that I “will once again get control” but he cannot really tell me how to acheive that if I don’t have knees.