A fickle friend

by Paul Kandarian

In the ongoing saga, The Aging of America, we bring you the latest chapter, “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Arthur.”

I’ve got arthritis in my, well… pick a body part, any part, be it north, south, east or west, I guarantee you’re right. And one place in particular are my knees, the right one worse than the left. But for the last year or so, that’s largely gone away, oddly, with very little pain which leaves Arthur (I call it that because my Dad was a master of malapropisms and called it “Arthuritis”), to just take up residence in another location and make that part and me miserable.

It’s truly bizarre: when my knee hurts, my shoulder doesn’t. When my shoulder does, my knee doesn’t. Nice that Arthur is such a caring and sharing soul, isn’t it?

But in the last several months, I got what I thought was “a floating body” in my knee, not to be confused with that horrific scene in War of the Worlds where Dakota Fanning sees a ton of them bobbing past her on a river.

This floating body – cartilage, bone, a piece of an old hockey puck, who knows – has found a home in my knee, or so it feels. Somewhere in my knee. I know not where. I just know that at random moments, it furtively wiggles into the bendy part and locks it up and I don’t even know it until I try to straighten my leg out and I scream like someone stuck a white-hot knife into the joint.

That happened on a set most recently on a film where I played a 19th-century British naval captain during the War of 1812. I was sitting alone in a room we were going to shoot in and straightened out my leg and screamed like a banshee when it locked up and people ran in assuming I’d been shot by pirates or something. I mean, they could’ve heard me all the way to the UK, it hurt that much.

A few minutes later whatever caused it dissipated and I walked around like nothing happened, like that white-hot knife to the knee never happened. Arthur, you fickle minx.

So I made an appointment with my ortho doc at New England Baptist, and that’s how you can tell you’re of a certain age: you have Medicare and a steady ortho doc. This woman also treats Arthur in my shoulder, which at any given time feels like an alligator is gnawing it with great, slow, savoring intensity.

They take x-rays, my doc comes in and says the same thing she says about my shoulder: “You need to have that replaced. There’s nothing left there, it’s bone on bone,” ruling out my medical opinion of floating bodies ravaging my joints.

She also said she can’t believe I’m not in a whole lot more pain, given the severity of the deterioration and the fact there is technically no cartilage left, which is of course because Arthur eats cartilage like mosquitos suck blood.

So now I’m on a mission, and after obtaining various advanced degrees from The Google University School of Medicine, I feel qualified to try anything, up to and including a voodoo doll with bad knees. In other words, acupuncture. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it but there’s a caveat: trying to find a provider who’ll take insurance.

The ones I’ve called are small operations and don’t have the means to leap through insurance hoops, notably Medicare turning down the claim only to bounce it to the supplemental insurance carrier, notably making yet another case why American health care sucks.

Thankfully, we live in an area with arguably the best medical care on the planet, so I turned to the Graduate School of Medical Education – Facebook – for advice from friends and got tons of docs I can hit up for a second opinion.

I will do that, of course, fully aware of the futility of that because Arthur is eating my cartilage like a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, chomp by chomp, and that well-fed alligator will just move from joint to joint until there’s nothing left but a clattery pile of bone on bone covered in the slack body suit of flesh that used to be young and hale and hearty and didn’t hurt from just being. Nothing else. Just being.

And then The Aging of America will be done with the final installment: “Med School Cadavers: The Last Volunteer.” For now, pass the ibuprofen and fetch the ice pack. Take that, Arthur, you fickle minx.