Cortisone shots are awesome..for a little while

So. It’s now been 8 weeks since the injury.  The sharp, stabbing lateral knee pain caused by the meniscal tear is diminished but not gone.  But, as I sit here on the couch with my right leg tucked under me, my right knee is starting to do this weird  pain thing..and in another second I’ll have to straighten out my leg and massage my knee until the pain subsides.  This particular injury is turning out to be a real pain to deal with.  Not only has it stopped me from running, but i when I drive or occasionally when I am just sitting with a flexed knee, I get a really  intense pain that radiates down my calf. The doctor wasn’t sure why, but she gave me a cortisone shot and Whee!..completely pain-free within 20 minutes.  Until it wore off, after 48 short but very happy hours.  So now I wonder if I can score some cortisone on the street somewhere? But back to the radiating flexed-knee  pain.   I have developed a hypothesis, because, hey, it’s my knee and not having a hypothesis bugs me.  When I first got the MRI, after being off the knee resting for several days, the radiologist noted that along with the radial tear to the meniscus, and moderate effusion in the joint  there was a Baker’s (popliteal) cyst at the back of the knee that was “leaking” down into the calf.  The BC is thought to be a result of the meniscal injury, and apparently it’s the result of joint fluid sort of flowing into a bursa in the back of the knee through a narrow channel.  So, when one ruptures or leaks, as in my case,  synovial fluid is very irritating and can cause a lot of pain.    But when I exercise, I still get the ‘fat knee’ feeling, caused by effusion building up in the knee.  So, back to the weird part. The worst  instances have been when driving home from PT or from the gym.  Within a couple of minutes of driving I get this incredibly intense  pain and have to pull over, extend my knee, grit my teeth and and massage as hard as I can before I can drive again.  So, I’m thinking that when I flex my knee, the effustion in the knee space is injected into the Baker’s cyst and/or, the sitting position causes the leak to open up and inject fluid down into my calf.  Either that or something about the sitting position in a car causes the BC to press on nerves or blood vessels.  The car seat is definitely deeper than a normla chair, so the back of my knee is pressing in the edge of the seat in a way that likely doesn’t happen with my kitchen chairs, for example.  In any case, I feel like a good portion of the pain is from the Baker’s cyst and not the torn meniscus per se.   If true, it means that it’s all about reducing the effusion in my knee.  Now, if only  could figure out how to do that..  Sigh.

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