Some of you may remember that a couple of months ago I was having persistant knee pain and got a cortisone shot in each knee as treatment. After a few days of worse-before-it-gets-better agony, the pain went away entirely and I felt like a new woman. For a few weeks.

Two or three weeks ago the pain returned and has been getting steadily worse. I finally called the doctor’s office again yesterday, and I have an appointment on January 10 for more cortisone. I’m not convinced, however, that there shouldn’t be some more diagnostics done, so I’m planning to have a little chat with the doctor before I let her near my knees with the needle. I’ve never had a problem like this in the States, so I don’t know how it would be treated there, but it doesn’t seem like sound medicine to me just to keep pumping someone full of cortisone without doing any x-rays or range-of-motion tests or anything more detailed than poking around manually on the troublesome joint for a couple of minutes.

Either way, the next ten days while I wait to see the doctor look to be long and pain-filled. Being pregnant, I can’t take any pain-killers other than acetaminophen/paracetamol, and not even much of that, and we don’t have a bathtub, so a long, hot soak is not an option. At least I have a heating pad and a few bags of frozen vegetables.

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I feel like I should write something about the tsunami, but anything I said would feel forced and false. Suffice it to say that I’m as horrified as I can be here in my warm, safe haven far from the disaster zone. The truth is, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the enormity of what has happened in Southeast Asia, and all I can do is shake my head in dismay as I watch and read the news reports and repeat prayers that feel ever more inadequate with each repetition.