My Needs were Kneed!

In the film Oh, God! George Burns plays God and admits, "I made the seeds too big," in reference to avocados. I wonder if human knees were another mistake. After all, at my age almost everyone seems to have knee problems.

Most of my better days as a kid included sports. I was pretty good at knowing my limits. My favorite strategy was to hold back just a little, and save a surprising burst for just the right moment.

My college intramural team was aptly called The Zips and we were clearly outclassed by Phi Kappa Tau - the jock fraternity. I was so frustrated that I uncharacteristically dove for a ball I had little chance of getting and twisted my knee. I got up and could barely walk. 

The doctor said I had torn cartilage and recommended surgery. Everyone I knew with knee surgery went back for more knee surgery and didn't get better. So I declined and soon noticed that by slowly bending my knee when it was sore, I felt a pop and it felt better. I scoffed at knee surgery and that satisfying pop may have been a blessing in disguise. It foreshadowed my chiropractic career.

I was on crutches after that injury during a snowy, icy winter in Allentown, PA. I got blasted with snowballs from good friends and helplessly took it, while laughing at their laughs. I went through enough casts from wet snow and beer-covered party floors that the school doctor was tired of seeing me.

My son Devan played soccer since preschool and was one of the better players on his state championship high school team. He'd never been hurt until a knee injury derailed him that season. I look at his leg structure and see my own. Do the sins of the fathers get passed to their sons?

Devan synchronistically calls me as I'm typing the above words. He's hiking the hills above LA, says he'll send me an essay he wrote about knees called Rearticulation. Knees connect us.

The knee is a large, complicated monstrosity, with ligaments and tendons holding it together much like duct tape. The flimsy cartilage cushion is a disaster waiting to happen. The kneecap protects the whole mess. Or, as Devan says, "The kneecap floats in a mucous sea of synovial fluid, bobbing up, down, and side-to-side like a confused dance partner."

Devan goes on, "the ligaments which connect bone to bone, are infamous acronymic pests: ACL, MCL, LCL. If you haven't heard of those, yours are probably still working. Humans are the most advanced bipeds. We are the chosen ones. But chosen for what?" It's too late to ask George Burns.

My first knee memory was in Naylor's Run Park in suburban Philadelphia. Urbanization was racing towards it. The fairies were already starting to flee. But it did have trees, a creek and trails. It became a boxing ring for much anticipated after-school fights, with its backdrop of trash and broken glass. It was my closest connection to nature.  

My parents weren't attracted to the outdoors, which they considered scary. They physically shuddered if I mentioned the woods, as if monsters lurked there. The beach or “down the shore" as everyone called it, Atlantic City, was my parents' interfaced with nature. 

When I was about five they made an exception to take me to a picnic at Naylor's Run. I was tearing around with some other kids but tripped and fell onto my knees and a broken piece of glass. Jagged stitches from Delaware Memorial Hospital are a keepsake that reinforced my image of nature as a scary thing.

Perhaps life is boot camp, to teach us before we move on. If so, my knees have been teachers. Devan says, " I find myself projecting a weird, knee-based viewpoint onto the rest of the world. My aging van seems to lack meniscus. My sticky umbrella seems a man with creaky knees. The summit of Mt. Hood looks like the curve of a kneecap."

I ran for recreation when I began my chiropractic career in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I had a staff of twelve, huge overhead and no business training. I was just a city kid from Philly turned hippie that improbably stumbled upon chiropractic while living in a tipi on a vision quest. The spirits told me what but they forgot to tell me how.

Part of my routine was running on the beach, until one day I strained my knee. It wasn't a twist or turn, just the extra push needed on sand. I stopped running the beach. The next thing to go was basketball. I'd had too many injuries there.

Devan says, "I wonder if my children will resent my nostalgic armchair stories as I resented my own father's. Stories of the good old days. Stories of strong thighs and resilient joints. As a ski patroller I've dealt with many knee injuries. These fragile and complex joints account for over 53 million surgeries per year in the United States alone. The knee bones and soft tissues were functionally in place 320 million years ago, whereas skiing wasn't around until the Norwegians. An overweight man wedging down the slope smells like a torn ACL."

Years later I had a practice in Bellingham, WA. My older son Jerome's high school graduation party included basketball in our driveway. No one could stop Liam from scoring. My forte was defense. I knew I could stop him and couldn't resist the call. Not long after joining the game I landed oddly and felt something give in my knee. By evening I could barely walk. I tried to find someone to cover my practice the next day. No one was available. 

Devan says, " I grew up in a family whose livelihood hinged on the well-being of my father's knees. He told me, take it easy on my Schwartz knees. Instead, I played tennis, basketball, and soccer like there was something to prove. Myopically, I approached a trail of athletics my father had forcedly abandoned."

The morning after the injury I drove to work with no clue how I would pull it off. I had a ridiculously busy schedule. Chiropractic is very physical and I was on crutches. I had to figure out how to alter my technique and still be effective. My jerry-rigged solution was a combination of force and non-force techniques that I duct taped together before slowly transitioning back to my normal procedures over the next month.

Why did I become a chiropractor? I taught fifth grade in a tiny town on the Yakama Indian Reservation before tutoring Lummi Nation kids in Bellingham. It became clear that teaching was not my path. 

I knew I would make a mistake if I jumped into a new field with mind-based inspiration. I needed to ask some higher power. The answer was right in front of me.

I tried a Native American vision quest. I hoped my appreciation of their culture and efforts to learn from them compensated for being a white city kid. I pitched a tipi on Orcas Island and asked for divine intervention. I decided to just Be Here Now as Ram Das encouraged.

One day, out for a walk, I came upon a sign Chiropractic Life Center. I had no idea what that was and walked in. The chiropractor was very personable and offered me a free treatment. I wasn't having any problems but he popped me from head to toe and I felt better. Six months later I was in chiropractic school. Did that satisfying pop I had been doing to my knee make me receptive to this lesson?

By 2002 popping the knee no longer could fend off the forces of time and nature. The knee was bone-on-bone, the cartilage gone. I had a partial reconstruction of the knee. 

I brought along a Loreena McKennitt CD and asked the surgeon if he would play it during the surgery. I drifted asleep to her haunting voice and the operation was a great success. A couple months later I played that same CD and felt an immediate sharp pain in my knee. What other memories do my knees hold? How would its mix-tape of my life sound?

Now my good knee is my bad knee. It's been ten years since the orthopedist said I might get five years out of it before surgery. My knees are my Achilles heels and I realize there are lessons there.

Devan says, "Through the acoustics of my knees I try humbly listening to the articulations of the world. How else can I understand my true inheritance - from my father, my culture, my species? We try to tell our bodies who we are: instead, our bodies tell us who we are."

Here is the ending of my poem Knees:

Perhaps knees are a blessing in disguise.

Maybe they keep me from doing what my stupidity

would scream is still possible.

So, thank you, knees.

Even though you're a pain,

you may know more than

I give you credit for.