I have played tennis my whole life. When I was 22 years old I had an injury due to playing tennis and had my left knee scoped, while I was in college at Auburn University. I bounced back pretty quick because I was ready to get back on the court and to my regular active lifestyle.
Surely “arthritis” isn’t making me hobble around at work, or cause me embarrassment when I attempt to climb the bleachers at my grandkids sporting events. I must have torn a ligament or something to cause all this pain. I had spent countless hours of icing, exercises and even acupuncture to make this pain go away.
I had suffered for years with arthritis in my knees which continually got worse as I got older. They were bad but not bad enough to do surgery, so I had years of injections. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 and had to undergo radiation and chemotherapy. Little did I know that chemo accelerates arthritis and it really did. In 2008, I was once again diagnosed with breast cancer. Since it was a different type of cancer, I had to undergo chemo again with different drugs.
I'm just the usual suspect. Not a super athlete. Just a wife and mother with a career. For years I tried to ignore constant knee pain. Maybe it was from growing up playing golf and all those dance recitals. I thought I was doing all the right things to try and reduce the pain; eliminate sugar in my diet, exercise, lose weight, etc. While on vacation, four years ago, one knee began to swell and I thought it was just overuse, running to catch trains in Italy.