Chris Dwan

Tag: medical

  • Knees

    Met with the orthopedic surgeon yesterday and agreed that he’s going to go in and repair or trim the medial meniscus in my left knee. I’m walking around pretty well these days – so there’s some debate on whether cutting on me is justified. However, I live in fear of my knee freaking out. Mornings are solid, but by the evening it’s usually pretty sore. I certainly wouldn’t go running, skiing, or play judo at anything close to full force. I’m 33 years old. I intend to be athletic for 20+ more years. At this point if I can repair my “bum knee” and get back to enjoying my workouts … I intend to.

    This is a routine outpatient surgery that takes about 30 minutes There are three possibilities with this surgery, and we won’t know which it is until he gets in there:

    (1) The meniscus is screwed up in such a way that all he can do is trim off the ragged bits that are flopping around and getting stuck in my knee joint. In that case he trims it up nice and neat. I’ll be in a knee brace for two weeks, have two more weeks of limited mobility, and then I’ll be back at full strength. Full strength will be slightly reduced because of the removed bits … and I’ll have to be careful to protect the knee over time to prevent arthritis.

    (2) The meniscus is “cleanly” torn, in such a way that he can repair it. This is a better situation than (1), because it has a decent chance of healing up completely. However, in order to allow the complete healing, I would be in a brace for 1 to 2 months, and out of action for an extra two months after that.

    So, if it’s the “good” possibility, my recovery will be about fourfold longer … but it’ll be a better repair.

    Oh yeah: I mentioned that there’s a third possibility. That’s because it’s surgery, and after watching redmeds experience last year … I no longer have much faith in even the most ordinary and routine of procedures. The “consent” form includes infection, loss of limb, and so on. There’s a reason they put that crap on there.

    C’mon body – work with me here. We’re in this together.

  • Knee

    Called the doctor this morning and convinced them to tell me my diagnosis. Torn medial meniscus. They recommend surgical repair, which is supposedly a 20 minute procedure from which I can walk out of the hospital, take it easy a couple of weeks, and then be back at the gym.

    Having observed last year, I have my doubts.

    On the other hand, apparently these things don’t heal on their own, and aromatherapy isn’t really making much of a dent in it.

  • MRI Images

    –UPDATE–

    Re-posted since the pictures ought to stay put now.

    –/UPDATE–

    I got the raw data from my knee MRI on a CD. They gave me the full DICOM data, which is the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard. The vast majority of medical imaging devices produce DICOM formatted files … which means that, basically, there’s no need for the radiologist interpreting the results to be physically close to the machine. Now, there are still advantages to physically seeing, touching, and smelling the patient – but in terms of an upgrade from “ink on plastic,” it’s pretty awesome.

    OSIRIX is a piece of software (for apple) that reads and displays DICOM data. Until yesterday, I had not realized quite how powerful this stuff is:

    this is about to get geeky, contain some big images, and have pictures of slices of my thigh

  • Medical geekitude

    That last post was heavy, this is less so:

    My MRI was totally relaxing. They gave me a selection of CDs to listen to for the half hour I was in the tube. I picked coldplay.

    There were signs up all over the hospital indicating that patients own their own medical information, and that we could request a CD with our imaging results. So I did … and it took them about three minutes to burn a CD for me. I got home, opened the envelope, and I have two CDs … one with x-rays from yesterday .. and the other with MRI data from today.

    Here’s the best part: I got the raw DICOM data … which is the standard by which medical imaging types toss around full resolution medical data. I downloaded OSIRIX, which is a free and open source DICOM viewer … and now I’m busily scaling intensities up and down on these 6.5MB images of my knees.

    Of course, it was a total buzzkill when I opened up the “metadata” portion of the files and found my social security number in there. Bummer! Of course, they do have a “confidential” sticker on the envelope … I guess that’s par for the course.

    Now, if only I knew what any of this crap meant!