I had a doc appointment today to go over the results of my MRI. The good news is that I do not have a torn meniscus. My meniscus looks fine. The better news is that my ligaments in general look to be in great shape, that everything is sitting where it should, etc. He even said that some of the arthritis that he saw in the X-ray doesn’t seem to be present in the MRI, meaning it could have just been compression due to my positioning for the X-ray. The MRI did show some inflammation in the region of my pain but there was no cause for it being shown. So, the bad news is that I really am back to having no idea why my knee hurts in that one particular spot or is so sensitive to any pressure in that one spot, nor does my doctor. He said it could just be some general inflammation from an irritated muscle. He said it could be triggered by any of a number of things (weather, activity, shoes, sitting, standing…anything really), but that with this kind of general inflammation, the best thing for me to do is physical therapy to strengthen the muscles and further define the source of the pain, and also for me to be on alert for what seems to make it worse and to guide my activity accordingly. He said that they can also do things in the therapy like ultrasound to help soothe the inflamed muscle, and that the therapy along with the NSAIDs should help this go away with time.
I have been doing the stretches that they gave me at the last appointment, and they really do seem to help. Particularly, my knee seems to get worse while I’m at work. This could be from sitting for a long period or because my sitting position isn’t good, but what I’ve started doing is setting an Outlook reminder to myself twice a day to get up and stretch using the prescribed exercises.
I don’t like not knowing what is wrong, but I do like that surgery is off the table (ha! pun not originally intended). PT is going to be expensive and time-consuming, but I’d rather do it and have a defined outcome (good or bad) than not do it and wonder what could have been.
The doc also gave me a different NSAID (Celebrex) to try. I’d been having stomach issues with the last one (Naprosyn). Naprosyn is basically Aleve, although the ones I got were super-strength and in an enteric coating to make them slowly act over 24 hours. He gave me some samples of Celebrex to try, with the thought that it might not be as hard on my stomach and a scrip to use if the samples seem to work for me. So, I took some of it after lunch today, and we’ll see how it goes. Either way, his view on the NSAIDs is to just basically take them when I need them, particularly if I’m going to be doing a strenuous activity. Regarding biking, he said it was very likely that biking would make the knee ache more, particularly if I was biking on a high gear or going uphill. He recommended flat biking only (not hard to respect that around here) and making sure to put my seat up as high as I can tolerate (which I’d done already this past summer for knee pain reasons), and he also basically said to use cautious judgment with biking…that if it hurts, don’t do it as often…and he said it’d be worthwhile for me to try finding another activity to use in its place, particularly if the NSAIDs don’t help with it and the pain is getting worse when I do it. That makes me sad, because I was really enjoying biking. It also makes me sad because I really can’t put the seat on my bike up any higher and still be able to manage the handlebars…it’s just the type of bike it is and the size of the frame…and I really can’t justify a new bike if I’m not even sure that I can continue biking. Pooh. 
