Last Thursday, Dr. Connell gave me a knee brace. My anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) was shot, he informed me. I was miffed.

A few months back, I’d gone to Doc with pain I thought was related to prior back surgery. Nothing wrong with your back, he said: You have bursitis in your hip; I might could fix it with a few cortisone shots. I was miffed again.

The cortisone worked but not entirely, or so I thought. I went back with my complaints but Doc said no, fool, I’ve cured the bursitis. Now you have tendinitis in your tushie and how’s about some physical therapy?

Fine, I said, miffed royally, but what about this knee? It’s getting to the point that I’m having trouble walking on it, let alone play tennis.

He rocked it back and forth. It went click-click loud enough for the receptionist to hear. Hmm, no ACL, he said.

Now I was miffed beyond words. Here I’d been walking (or hobbling) around for more than 25 years under the misapprehension that you can’t play tennis, ski or lift weights – all things I’d been blithely doing – with a damaged ACL.

One can do them without a knee cartilage though. His partner had sliced out my knee cartilage around 1980, saying I could live pretty normally post-surgery if I kept my quadriceps muscles strong. Since then I’ve done leg extensions religiously – and played tennis, skied and lifted weights – although things have gotten worse.

Now Connell has the nerve to tell me what I’d been doing is impossible.

The brace is one of those big black ugly things with plastic doodads to hold your knee in place. They look like the cups that keep casters from wearing holes in the floor. I love it. I asked if I could wear it all the time. Just take it off when you shower, Connell said.

In the unlikely event that you’re still with me, let me say that there’s no interesting way to write about aches and pains. By the fourth or fifth paragraph, even I’m bored, and they’re my own aches and pains for God’s sake.

But when you get to a certain age, that’s often how cocktail-party chatter begins.

There are reasons beyond the expectable that we like to bore our friends with this stuff, the expectable being, What could be more interesting than Me?

I have contemporaries who now use canes, for example, while I’m still struggling to play tennis. I’ve discovered that regular exercise and stretching make my tennis efforts possible (or anyway plausible), so I proselytize.

My words fall on deaf ears, leaving me feeling icky.

What I think I want is to bitch-slap these people until they wake up and start taking care of themselves. What I think I want is for them to live forever.

What I really want is for me to live forever. At some level I know that’s not possible. But meanwhile, I’m embracing the brace.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. When I’m not writing blogs or fiction, I write direct marketing copy — what some unkindly call junk mail or spam. If it really were “junk,” your mailbox would empty out fast. That doesn’t happen because people still enjoy reading — and some of the most scintillating writing in America is sitting right in that mailbox of yours. Got a project in mind? Call me at 301-656-8753.