Physical Therapy

We’re in San Francisco for a month so that my wife Stephanie can get knee surgery from a really, really good surgeon.

Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.

While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”

“It’s a clunk.”

He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)

And then he pulled out his medical recorder and started dictating. “Thirty-two year old male presenting with medial pain and clunk in left knee.”

I thought it was pretty funny, the way he kept saying “clunk,” but when I got home I googled and it turns out that patellar clunk syndrome is an actual medical term.

So then we go to see the physical therapist, and the surgeon tells him what’s up with my knees, and I lie on the table and wait for the therapist to get some supplies.

And after a few minutes he walks into the room with a plunger. Like this:

Which he situates over my knee so as to form a seal, and starts pumping up and down, as if to clear an American toilet (German toilets never clog. Seriously, I have never seen a plunger in a German bathroom).

So this whole knee-plunging frenzy, right on the heels of all that talk about clunking, was in my view pretty comical and I was enjoying it all as a piece of art well worth the physical therapy fee, as long as it didn’t do any actual damage.

That is, until the plunger succeeded in detaching the fat pad from underneath my patella and my knees suddenly felt better than they had felt in years.

The clunk is still there, but I’m looking forward to my next therapy session with these crazy knee geniuses.

I took a plunger home with me, too.