Pain

Jack Deatherage

(8/2022) A knee pops loudly enough for me to hear it. I'd probably go back to sleep, but the stab of pain that accompanies the "pop" becomes a constant throb. I churn the bed sheets for hours until finally falling back into an exhausted sleep. Not wanting to bother Doc Thomas with such a trivial ailment, I set about fixing the problem. I begin with my favorite drug- alcohol. While that provides brief periods of relief, it eventually starts a cascade of other problems, some worse than the popping knee- the beginnings of alcoholic neuropathy. Over-the-counter pain relievers follow, well, accompany the alcohol. Those weren't of much help either. Being sick with COVID was the only time my knees and other aching joints did not hurt at all.

After COVID, the DW and I took to walking to regain some wind and stamina. The joint pain returned with a vengeance. I began wearing a pressure sleeve- I often had a sleeve around each knee. While the sleeves helped a little, I still pondered the possibility of correcting whatever was wrong without darkening Doc's doorway. That led me to the interwebs where I confused myself badly. But not so badly that I missed some key facts that seem to apply to my situation.

First up, I weighed 302 pounds when I was having the worst knee pain. Now 302 pounds on a man standing six feet six inches tall isn't outrageous if he's in good shape. I am not in good shape. Last time I was in anything resembling good shape was in 1973 when I'd walk into town to get drunk. I weighed about 180 and was nineteen years old. Pile on nearly fifty years and more than a hundred pounds, spend most of the last seven years sitting in front of a computer monitor, or napping between pages of books and, yep, I can see how I got where I am.

Second thing, one I knew without having doctors telling me - I need to get control of my diet as well as get a handle on portion control. I'm a binge eater- 4,400 calories going down the pie-hole during one meal is not an exceptional event for me. In my youth those calories must have burnt off with just the act of eating. That changed before I reached my twenty-fifth birthday. Couple that with moving into town, losing access to the fields and streams I tramped through at least weekly, and I wasn't surprised to find myself having to loosen my belt. It hurt to eventually buy pants of a larger waist size. Buying clothes cut into my drinking money.

The third thing I've learned is the foods I eat are causing most, if not all my problems. For years I've seriously referred to my "food square"- Salt, Sugar, Fat and Crunch were my four-food groups- in deliberate opposition to the USDA's food pyramid. Potato chips fried in lard were the perfect food. And why not? It's a hell of a lot easier to open a bag of chips and munch away than it is to gather the ingredients and prepare a meal from my childhood- something Mom would spend hours putting together.

How did I arrive at my food square? I learned to cook a few dishes I liked. Beings I still lived with the family I usually ate whatever Mom cooked, but the day came when I had money to buy the foods I liked. Laziness quickly followed and convenience followed that! Convenience - the most evil word in my vocabulary.

Convenience led me to hastily made sandwiches of white bread, mayo and salty ham slices. Bags of potato and corn chips. Pastas. Lots and lots of pastas. Store bought sauces. Frozen pizzas. Convenience! (I sit here and shudder with memories only months old.) Even my getting back into real cooking was ruled by convenience and my food square. Homemade egg noodles, artisan breads, cakes, cookies, stir fries (heavy on red meat, or fatty pork) dumped over heaping piles of durum or rice pastas soaked with olive oil, or bacon grease.

I doubt I have thirty years to lose a hundred pounds. However, I initially lost nine pounds in two weeks by not eating crunchy, salty, starchy, fatty, glorious chips, white bread and pastas. Cutting back on the meats that had been the bulk of my meals, increasing the amounts of cabbage, broccoli, cucumbers, bell peppers and celery, have eased the knee pain a bit.

Some days the pain is only a memory. I've noticed more pain the day after eating bread with foods that are high in purines, which leads me to think gout may be destroying the knee cartilage. Gout spurs my determination to figure out what I need to eat to get back in control. To that end, I ransack the state's public libraries and find a book that may contain most of the information that months of blundering about in the interwebs never presented to me on a single site. (The totality of human knowledge may be held in one's hand via a smart phone, but good luck sorting through billions of pages looking for it.)

The book I was looking for was on the stacks of the Emmitsburg branch of the county library - "The World's Healthiest Foods: Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating" by George Mateljan. With a large dose of skepticism I pulled the tome from the shelf and took it home. Upon skimming past the book's introduction and the how-to-use-this-book sections I was instantly reminded of the pagans' insistence that the universe will provide me with what I need as soon as I have that need firmly fixed in my mind. (Evidently I don't need to win a half a billion-dollar lottery?)

Mateljan lists his 100 healthiest foods and gets into purine acid content, whether or not the food is a potential allergen, its likelihood of being grown with heavy use of pesticides and in the case of fish- whether it's likely to have high levels of mercury. (I'm not surprised to learn the fish I most often eat are high in purine acid but contain little mercury!)

As beneficial as all that information is, what caused me to go online and buy the first edition of the book- "World's healthiest foods: the force for change to health"- is the hope it has the nutritional charts that accompany each food. Those charts alone would be worth the $8 I paid for the used book. Either version of the book will allow me to focus my attention on the highest ranked, nutrient dense, vegetables that I can grow in our garden.

Do I think "The World's Healthiest Foods" (either version) is the Holy Grail answer to my pain? Do either books really list the healthiest 100 foods? How the hell would an uneducated village idiot know?

What I do know is I have a guide now that I've begun this journey into my twilight years. Given my genetics and so far, no major health issues, those years could span decades!

We're rebuilding the garden. It's time to follow the pesticide free, green leafy road. Ant lions, tiger beetles and water bears, oh my!