Читать книгу Arthritis For Dummies - Barry Fox - Страница 56

Mark, a 35-year-old television executive, had been a hotshot college quarterback in his younger days. But after winding up at the bottom of one too many half-ton pileups, his knees were shot.

“I was a sitting duck for those guys,” Mark says ruefully. “They just couldn’t wait to pounce on me, no matter what the play. After two years of getting hit over and over again, my body just couldn’t take it anymore. I was permanently sidelined.”

Sidelined from football, perhaps, but not other sports. Over the next several years he took up jogging, karate, fencing, and weight lifting. “I tried to do something every day,” Mark said. “But it wasn’t just because I wanted to keep in shape. I would get itchy if I didn’t get a certain amount of exercise on a daily basis.” In spite of his efforts, though, he managed to pack an extra 20 pounds onto his once rock-hard body. (“Beer and nachos while watching football,” Mark explained, smiling.)

Then one day, right in the middle of a fencing match, his right knee began to hurt. “It was a deep pain, way inside my knee, a pretty intense soreness that lasted through the match and really bugged me,” Mark said. Afterward, he iced his knee, and the pain went away. But it began to bother him now and again, often during fencing, and also when he was jogging or in the bent-knee stance of karate. When the pain became present more often than not, Mark went to see a sports medicine doctor.

“Sounds to me like osteoarthritis,” his doctor said. An X-ray confirmed that the cartilage in his knee was “rough” and quite thin. “Arthritis!” Mark exploded. “But that’s for old people. I’m only 35!”

Two years later, Mark’s osteoarthritis is pretty well under control. He rarely has pain, unless he stands in line for long periods of time. And although he has given up certain knee-thrashing sports (such as football, karate, and fencing), he has found that he’s still physically able to do just about whatever he wants.

“I chalk my recovery up to two main things,” Mark says. “Losing weight and switching activities. Once I dropped that extra 20 pounds I’d been lugging around, my knee pain also dropped about 50 percent. Then I started swimming every day — a real boon to my joints since I could keep them loosened up without the slamming impact of jogging or jumping rope. Yoga has also helped me gain some flexibility while getting rid of some tension. And I’ve been taking a few supplements that seem to help. All in all, I feel like a brand new guy.”