entirely safe and fun

And now, an actual picture of my shredded meniscus.

Click the photo to enlarge. The torn bit is being depressed by the probe a little behind the focus plane on the left side of the field, and bits are floating around in the tear itself. Obviously, in need of repair.

As an aid to visualization, I’ve drawn a little diagram, left, of the top of the cartilage, as seen from above. It shows the line of the tear following the contour of the cartilage for most of its length (red). In the drawing, I’ve taken the liberty of lengthening and narrowing the whole shape of the meniscus - in reality, it’s closer to circular, as you can see in the photo, right. A normal meniscus (click to enlarge) looks like what it is: a smooth, padded surface that allows a joint to absorb shock and glide through its range of motion. This is my healthy medial meniscus, from the same knee. Ideally, by trimming away damaged tissue from my lateral meniscus and sewing together the two torn portions, it will be restored to a state more like this.

In other knee-related news, the cult classic capoeira kung-fu flick Only the Strong finally was released on DVD. Among other things, it provided the soundtrack to the “Zoom Zoom” Mazda ads, introduced Mark Dacascos to a wider (non-zero, I suppose) audience, and made the spectacular martial art of capoeira internationally visible, probably inspiring more people to wreck their knees than any other non-football movie.