Success and Disappontment

The grocery challenge worked. Our freezer and pantry are looking a lot emptier. I only had to run to the store for milk and for something to take to "feed the teacher" yesterday at the kid's school. We didn't go hungry and we didn't have to resort to eating any weird combinations of food. The challenge is back on to stay under budget for the month of September. I am debating whether to renew my Sam's club membership or not. Still trying to figure out if Sam's actually saves us money????

Now, onto the bad news. After months of wondering what is wrong with my knee, I headed back to my Ortho for some advice. It's no secret that I have bad knees, a combination of playing competitive soccer, bad genes, bad luck and not taking care of them when I should have. In any case, I can usually manage the symptoms of my knees and they have been quite happy this year but always feeling a bit weak. I successfully ran the 5k summer series here (placed 3rd in the series in my AG). Then a few weeks ago I started to get some pain in my right knee, it came on quite suddenly and got to the point where it felt very weak and unstable, not something I could work through. The Ortho ordered an MRI and I was actually pretty scared at what might be going on in there. The good news is that there is no torn meniscus, no loose bodies, but the bad news is that I have a pretty good size bone contusion. At first, I was confused. I hadn't impacted my knee to get a bruise, but this is different, it's possibly a bruise from the bones rubbing together, so most likely something mechanical. First goal is to get rid of the pain and irritation which could take 1-6 months depending on many factors, unfortunately being on my feet at work all day will slow the healing process. Then I need to do lots of PT to get the knee strong again (there is already nerve impingement and muscle atrophy). It's going to be a bit of a long road.
I'm actually not freaked out by this. I knew the day would come when I had to take care of this. I'm going to get a Dexa-scan to check bone density due to hereditary factors, and I am going to do the PT that I really should have done 10 years ago. Having my knee feel this bad is a wake up call. I want my knee to feel good so I can enjoy my life, I am not even worried about training right now. Like I said in a previous post, I have achieved a lot of my Triathlon goals and if I had to hang up the running shoes (which I won't without a fight) I would be OK with that too.
I will continue to update the blog and maybe some of the stuff I am going through will help other athletes with knee issues :-)