musings, life lessons & poetry from Theresa Jarosz Alberti

Tag: knees

A TALE OF ADVOCACY: TWO KNEES AND A SURGEON

Published on my one year “a-knee-versary” of my first knee replacement surgery…


I was so angry at my surgeon. He’d finally agreed to operate on me, but his initial refusal to give me total knee replacement surgery had resulted in more than a year of excruciating pain and disability. Facing the upcoming surgery, I knew I needed to let go of my negative feelings before he sliced me open. It was time to focus on positive energy so that I’d be in the best frame of mind to heal.

Over and over again in the weeks before surgery, I thought: I forgive him his ignorance. He doesn’t know me, my strength, my abilities. I’ll show I’m I’m a good candidate for this surgery despite his misgivings. I will be a success. Continue reading

An Update, and Good News!

It’s been awhile since I did a health update. I get asked about my knees all the time when I run into people. Now I have some news, so it’s time to share.

The last posts had been on the procedures I had this last winter/spring. After months of pursuit, I finally had radiofrequency ablation done on each of my knees– a procedure where they insert three needles and burn out the nerve endings. It’s supposed to give pain relief, and for some people, it gives them a couple of years of increased mobility with a big decrease in pain. Unfortunately, for me it only gave me a little pain relief and no increase in mobility. For each procedure, I had to go through a whole painful pre-procedure to do a test of the needle locations. It was quite discouraging to not get better results from all of this.

My next plan was to go back to looking for a surgeon for knee replacement surgery. You may remember that a year ago I’d been rejected for surgery by a few surgeons because of my weight. While I understand they have concerns and that there are increased risks of infection with larger patients, I knew that I was a pretty good candidate for surgery anyway… Continue reading

Warning: Detours and Crisis Ahead…

A lot has changed for me in the last 6 months. Spring and summer are known as road construction season in Minnesota, and I find I’m on a long detour now, off-road from where I thought I was going. It’s not horrible — I know some people going through really horrific detours in their life. Mine is challenging and difficult, but really just AFGO (Another Fucking Growth Opportunity, or as we writers say: more material).

In the previous post, I wrote about my efforts to go from temping jobs to pursuing freelance business writing full time. Just as I was putting the final touches on my planning and research, I started to get hit by some things that threw me off track…. Continue reading

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