My wounded knee is acting up and it is starting to worry me.

No, not the one I bashed up getting into a cab last week. That one is mostly fine now, there’s just a little stiffness left.

No, it is the other one, the one I hurt a couple of years ago when I made the life altering mistake of crawling on my hands and knees for a few feet.

Apparently, that was a thing I shouldn’t do any more. Kind of sucks that I had to find that out in a way that meant permanent damage to my body (because we still can’t fix cartilage, shockingly enough), but what the hell.

Anyhow, lately it’s been acting up, and by acting up I mean causing me increasing amounts of pain, and I am getting worried that I will end up on crutches when I only have two weeks of regular schooling left in the semester.

Then there’s finals, of course.

If things get any worse, I am at least going to have to start using my cane again. Not looking forward to that, seeing as I am already plenty awkward getting around with my large size and large kitbag. A cane is not as bad as crutches on that score, but it is still not good.

And obviously, a cane is not a long term solution. For that, I will have to get myself to the doctor. When I first brought this injury to him, he said there was an operation that might help, or might make it worse, and all it could really do was clean up the injury site, and so forth and so on.

At the time, I didn’t think it was worth it, because I could cope fairly well with the injury. It honestly didn’t bother me at all for a long long time.

But then I went back to school, and started moving around way more, and then it got real cold. And it started to bother me more. At first, not a lot, but it has been growing worse over time for the last month or so.

Then I bashed the other knee, which caused me to favour my bad leg (with the bad knee) for a couple of days, and that’s when things really started going all to hell.

So now, the be-damn’d thing is cramping up painfully even when I am sitting here in front of my computer, and I am worried that I might have made the tear in the cartilage worse. And sort of wondering what condition I would be in if I had agreed to the surgery way back when.

Knowing what the wait times for non critical surgery are like, I would probably be getting that operation right about now!

Still, I am way more open to the idea now. If the condition becomes critical enough, I will have no choice. Then again, if it becomes critical enough, I will not have to wait so long for the surgery.

So in a sense, the systems is saying “Go hurt yourself!”. Kind of like when it ignores mental health patients unless they have committed a crime.

You know what to do, desperate nutcases!

I am hoping the cold is a big part of why the knee has been worse lately. Cold is notoriously hard on muscular conditions, and while cartilage is not muscle, the stuff in your knee has complicated layers of muscles all around it. So it could be that the muscles are spasming and that’s what is causing the pain. It certainly feels like some of the muscles have gone rigid, and when I massage them, it relieves the pain a little.

Maybe all I need is to stay inside and keep the area warm for a while, and it will calm down and not be so ouchy.

But ya know…. school. If only this had waited till after exams! I will have lots of time to nurse it then.

Which brings me to the question on my mind right now : what the hell am I going to do with myself over Winter Break? I am so used to having school in my life now. What will I do all day?

My first thought was that I will start a novel. I missed NaNoWriMo this year, but that’s not the only time in which novels might be written. I could take Winter Break as my own personal novel writing challenge, and finally start a novel with no particular end in mind and no particular word count.

Who am I kidding, the mere prospect of that makes me really anxious. So maybe I will have a daily word count based on the number of days I have divided by some goal like 60,000 words.

Part of my mind is already trying to do the math.

Still, I will be pondering a concept for a novel over the next week and change. I have not written any fiction lately. I am sure I must have ideas just waiting to come out. And boredom is a wonderful stimulant for creativity if you give it a chance.

I learned in Psych 1200 that you get the best performance from a moderate level of arousal. ^[1] And I was just reading in The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris that animal studies have shown that boredom only leads to listlessness and lack of direction up to a point.

Past that point, it has the opposite effect. It makes animals manic, even frantic. The need for stimulation becomes so great that absolutely any action that produces a result the animal can sense becomes repeated over and over again.

And it wasn’t just animals. He described an experiment where they took a bunch of undergrads and had them put on vision-blocking goggles, hearing-blocking headphones, and thick and extremely heavy gloves. These poor subjects couldn’t touch, hear, or see anything, and they kept them like that for three freaking days.

That sort of thing is where ethics boards came from.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.