To the Doctor...Ugh.

My knee, while not getting any worse, has not gotten a whole lot better and while I can walk on it, I can't do any sort of physical activity on it. The pain isn't overwhelming, but it hasn't lessened a whole lot. On the good side, I can sit with my knee bent normally, which I couldn't do on Monday.

I haven't tried running yet, but I know it just won't happen and I need to find out exactly what I did to myself. So, I have an appointment tomorrow morning with an orthopedic specialist to get the low down and find out what stupid thing I did to hurt myself after being back to running for all of a month. It's just a very weird injury because I can do almost everything normally but when I lunge on the leg, I have pain. When I go up and down stairs, I have pain. When I walk, I can feel that the knee isn't right, but have almost no pain. Full range of motion, no pain. Iassume that the foot strike of running would cause pain, but I haven't tried.

My uninformed best case scenario is that I strained a tendon and it'll take a week or so to heal totally. RICE being the medicine.

My uninformed worst case scenario is that I slightly tore my meniscus somehow and will need to take several weeks off, probably not getting back to running until after we get back from the beach the second week of August or longer. I have some of the symptoms of a tear (location of the pain, slight clicking sound when I bend my knee) but lack others (swelling, joint locking, feeling that the knee is going to give way).

Bottom line: I have no idea what I did, so paying the $25 co-pay and a small charge for a possible X-ray is probably in order. Regardless, it doesn't look like I'm running anywhere anytime soon so I need to build a cross training regime that will keep me moving towards getting in shape in the meantime. I'll be going to the Sports Authority to pick up a medicine ball and dumbbells for at-home resistance training as well as a jump rope to work on agility, once my injury heals enough I can do that without pain.

So, we'll see what the doctor says. I'm going to the Arnold Palmer Sports Health Center at Union Memorial Hospital here in Baltimore. They're the medical team for the Baltimore Ravens and the center got its name for treating a serious hand injur that Palmer suffered some years ago and came back from with a full recovery. If I get to see the doctor I want, I'll be even happier because she is a marathoner and specializes in knee injuries.

With any luck, I'll get not-so-bad news.