Hitting The Deck
I have traumatized my left knee on several occasions. The first time was in 1990 when I was in Marbella with a large group of derivatives professionals at a conference. One of the activities involved four of us in a Japanese version of an open-topped Jeep running the traps of a scavenger hunt through the hills of Andalusia. I was one of the few in the group of 200 who spoke enough Spanish to be able to ask directions, which came in very handy as we wended our way through the little hill towns ticking off to-do’s. At the end of the circuit, we had to each get on a donkey and ride up to a bull ring to act like toreadors and then go back down the hill to a waiting luncheon. The thing about riding a donkey is that it is a bit too high to easily get onboard from the ground and yet it is low enough so you think you might be able to do it. Getting on at the bottom of the hill was done with the help of a step platform and a helping hand from a donkey handler. But up at the bull ring there was no step and no helping hand. I tried to get on from the cobblestone street and the otherwise unflinching donkey decided he was less enthusiastic in having me back on his back for the ride down and while all my weight was on my left foot, he moved and my left knee went pop. I literally saw red for a moment and rode the donkey down in a stupor of searing, white-hot pain.
I was told I had severed by ACL, but I decided not to have Kevlar replacement installed and just rehabbed myself back into daily activity, including skiing with a knee brace (more for comfort than prosthetic support). Five years later in Geneva (what is it about my left knee and Europe?), while lecturing my son about the geography of Switzerland and specifically the Rhône River, I stepped off a three foot granite step that I thought was a nine inch granite step and landed full weight on my stiffened left leg. My knee buckled and I felt that searing white-hot pain that suddenly seemed so familiar. After several days of rest in the Hotel du Rhône with an ice pack on my knee, I felt well enough to hobble my way back to New York, cutting short the trip and skipping the hike part-way up the Matterhorn (the injury may have saved me from an even worse fate!). I remember my visit to the orthopedist arguing that I would not go under general anesthesia just so he could do a simple arthroscopic inspection of my knee. We finally settled on an MRI, which revealed that the prior diagnosis of a severed ACL was not only not the case, but that the impossibility of ligament self-repair had, indeed, occurred and a small quarter-inch tear was throughly scarred over. The ACL was intact and there was nothing to be gained by surgery (imagine that!), so once again I let the knee recuperate and even kept skiing with my brace.
By 1996 I was thoroughly convinced that I knew better than every orthopedic surgeon in the world…at least about my particular rather large joints. My theory was that God or nature had given me appropriately large joints and ligaments to go along with my large body and that I was so far outside the normal curve that no one knew better than me about what should or shouldn’t happen to my knees. I had literally done a two-point extrapolation, which any statistician would tell you is a fool’s errand.
Since then I decided that I needed to take special care of my knees as I watched everyone I knew getting knee and shoulder surgeries. Kim has literally had both her knees replaced and her brother has had one replaced while her sister has two troubled knees and just chooses to suffer through with them. For some strange reason neither of my sisters or I have ever had a joint surgery or needed to consider any replacements. Nevertheless, my size made me think that I was always only one misstep away from a knee problem. In fact, not long ago I lost my balance walking near the spa (luckily I was in my bathing suit) and as I contemplated how to fall into the spa with minimal injury, I went down first on my left leg onto the spa seat, which was quite jarring to my stiffened left leg. Luckily the knee didn’t suffer, but the sacrum took a bruising that lasted for a few weeks.
So, yesterday, as we were recovering from heavy rains and even a quick but violent hail storm, I was dealing with the aftermath. The roofing guys were coming for the second time in three days to repair the brand new dining room roof, which was leaking in three places. I was not happy that there was a puddle on the slate deck, so I went out to squeegee it into the drain. Since the drain was clogged, Handy Brad came out to help me with that and as I was pushing the water toward the drain, I went through the deck floor. That was certainly a surprise.
The joists of the deck are these glue-lam I-beams which I had never seen before (but I’m told they are not at all unusual) and they are spaced sixteen inches apart. The slate tiles are 12×12 inches. I have a size 14 EE shoe size, but for some reason my shoe fit into the hole created by the split and shattered tile which lay in pieces in the trough of the joists. The bottom of the 12 inch wide joists was covered by a wire mesh lathe that supported stucco which formed the ceiling of the underside of the deck. Why the builders found it necessary to enclose the structure with stucco that couldn’t be seen by anyone except workmen who ventured under the deck is beyond me. I can’t swear how strong that wire mesh and stucco are, but they can’t be very strong. For some reason, I managed to fall backwards when the slate collapsed, so instead of bursting through the wire lathe and probably ripping the shit out of my ankle on the wire mesh, I literally came to a halt in a sitting position on the wet slate deck surface. I also have no idea why I was so lucky as to not twist or wrench my ankle or knee in the fall. But I didn’t.
I know enough at my age that given my size, any fall usually results in some sort of injury, even perhaps just a small one, but one I would feel by the following morning. But this time none of that happened. I know enough about adrenaline to know that its not unusual to not feel any small injury right after an accident, but it is now 36 hours since I fell, hitting the deck with my ass, and I feel no pain anywhere. How can that be? I have no idea, but I am prepared to accept the idea that the God of bad knees isn’t ready for me just yet and maybe he wants me to be able to do a few more gardening projects around the place before I do my knee ligaments in for a last time.