Bone on bone arthritis looks the same on every X-ray. The people attached to it don't.
One of my patients was a Boeing executive with 5 to 85 degrees of motion in his knee. He was still running 2 miles a day. Another was a former All-American athlete who hobbled in with a cane. An 85-year-old gentleman came to clinic in a wheelchair. Another was a 51-year-old dad who wanted to play basketball with his kids again. A 62-year-old former tennis player who wanted back on the court. A 78-year-old who wanted to volunteer at the library without pain.
All of their x-rays were bone on bone.
The x-ray told me about the knee. The person sitting in front of me told me everything else. What they'd lost. What they wanted back. Whether they believed they'd get it. That mattered more than the specifics of the x-ray on the screen.
I learned to see that years before medical school.
I was framing houses to pay my way through engineering school. George was the roofer on our crew. Santa Claus beard. Always singing Oh Happy Days. His body was wrecked from years of construction. He could still hand-nail shingles faster than I could with a nail gun.
His daughter was a student at MIT, I learned a lot from George talking about her experiences there.
George didn't look like the guy whose kid was at MIT, or someone who could whip into motion and smoothly fly through a roof. He looked like a guy who'd been on roofs his whole life, and was feeling the effects of it.
But when it came time to shingle a roof, he would begin belting out Oh Happy Days as his hands went into a blur of motion.
My grandpa had a line for that. He'd rather have a beat-up car that looked slow but was fast than a sleek car that looked fast but was slow.
The good thing is what's inside is what counts. And you control that.
Who's the George in your life? The one who taught you to look past the outside. Tell me about them in the comments.
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Good Thing Monday goes out every Monday. One story, one good thing.
Tell me your good thing this week. I read every one.