candelabra IV, or "The Knee Affair"

candelabra IV, originally uploaded by pr9000.

As some of you may already know, Amina took a tumble on her bike this weekend and ended up dislocating her knee. Take that literally – you couldn't find her knee if I spotted you two legs and a map. Where used to be the ligaments and other ... knee thingees ... there is now a whole lot of nothing.

Her injury is incredibly rare; usually knees pop to the side, but hers ... well, it's best described thusly: make two fists and bring them together, looking at the top of the interlocking knuckles. That's your knee. Now, take your right fist and move it on top of your left wrist. That's what happened to hers. All the ligaments are gone, but the docs can't tell if it'll be a reconstruction or a replacement until the swelling goes down enough to do more MRIs.

She has that leg in a temporary cast from her toes to her hips, and she can't do a thing by herself.

It's just shocking, how it happens in an instant – at 5:30 I was getting ready to make a great dinner, and at 5:45 I was strapped into the passenger's seat for my first-ever ambulance ride.

I was watching her scream in pain -- nobody seemed to realize she had dislocated her knee. The EMTs and ER docs all thought it was a compound fracture, so they gave drugs that should compound that kind of pain. Once the attending saw her x-rays he told the drug nurse "give her whatever she needs to be comfortable" ... and it was Dilaudid all the way (which, I've since learned, it's four times more powerful than heroin).

But before the groovy drugs, she was pretty much feeling the full effects of a dislocated knee, complete and pure without the diversion of narcotics. I went with her to X-Ray – notice my hip, in-the-know lingo there – and heard her cry out in pain that quite literally sent a chill down my spine. I know that's a cliche, but honestly, I could feel the hairs stand up from neck to heel and I charged out of the restroom, looking to kill the miserable bastard who was hurting my wife. I recall making eye contact with the rad techs. If I were the sort to have a shorter fuse, there probably would have been a police officer slapping cuffs on me.

Oh, there were a lot of cops in the ER. I bet that's pretty typical.

Once the ER docs popped her knee back in place – she was consciously sedated, which sounds like the first draft of a Pink Floyd song – they found us a room in the oldest wing of the hospital, which in reality was pretty cool. It looked like an unused Federation starship design from "Star Trek" ... of course, it could have been that it was 2 a.m. and I was exhausted from the day, but check it for yourself and tell me Commander Pike couldn't have taken that thing to the fourth planet in the Talos system.

As the lovely wife of my good friend John said on Facebook ... "LOL warp factor nerd." Takes one to know one, sister.

Some impressions of the 26 hours at Vanderbilt:

Even through the stress of the ER visit, I was chuckling to myself after visiting with one of Amina's nurses. "Hello, nurse!" (in my best Wakko voice) was in my head all night. If I ever need a catheter without benefit of anaesthesia, she can do it anytime.

They wheeled us over to the Round Wing about 1 a.m. or so, and the trip was almost like a Kubrick film – long, sleek, abandoned underground corridors, extreme white-blue florescent lighting, and the only sounds were the whirring of the air conditioning, the wiggle/rattle of the gurney wheels, and our footsteps. Very unnerving.

Vandy has a great cafeteria.

To top off the experience, Nashville experienced the second Biblical rainstorm just as we were leaving last night. Seemed to sum up the experience perfectly.

There is a long road ahead of us; surgery is unavoidable, and the task will be to find the best doctor with the best plan to get Amina back on her feet. Knowing my wife the way I do, I have no doubts we'll get there, and sooner than expected.