The quest for information...

It is 3;21 in the Am and I have been sitting here surfing the web trying to keep my mind occupied. I had a bad health night, sometimes it hits, tried to sleep and it only turned for the worse. Therefore, with Bengay on both knees, no idea in the world why I awoke with both knees kicking my butt never happened before, a dose of pain medication in my system and a cup of coffee in my hand might as well stay up and begin commiserating about health with my friends on the net a bit. There is a plus to this choice, one of you is not called at this hour asking what to do, I complain and rant, you read my true private thoughts on something unrelated to war and politics and we all feel better tomorrow. Hopefully.

I confess that I just may be a bit spoiled after all of these years. I have often mentioned a friend that is the closest person anyone can ever be in my life. She is my best friend and for seventeen years, we have shared a friendship of purest of love and the strongest of trust. She is the one constant in my life as I am in hers, whatever the problem, we have shared them, through the passing of loved ones, family members, severe health problems, surgeries, personal problem, we are the fist to call the other and we always work it out together. We have managed to get one another over many a personal, emotional and health issue and as she mentioned the other day, we got is down pat. Yes, we do. Friendship as ours is a precious commodity and when found cannot ever be lost.

At 3:30 I the morning I am not going to awaken her, not that she would say a word about it, I have been on that end as well, it never stopped us before.

Therefore, I ask myself, why two knees at the same time would suddenly awaken a person with pain. Surf the web of knowledge and maybe an answer in some hidden, rarely quoted medical text, site or someone boasting of a cure. That turns out to be nowhere near the truth, so I redirect and retype the questions. I will share the inputs and results with you with the thought, on the off chance; we may actually all learn something.

Starting with the famed, overused, often over rated, but always there, Google, I enter forms of the question: such as, “what causes sudden, severe knee pain”, or “sudden knee pain”, or “severe knee pain.” Rules of thumb, if not presented with the proper links corresponding to your search criteria, make sure to redirect with different forms of the words.

Google, Arthritis, Simple causes, this one looks promising, a medial encyclopedia titled, MedlinePlus, with baited breath and the desire to learn festering in my sleepy brain I pursue ever on with glee and hope. This is the opening,

“what causes sudden, severe knee pain”:

I am presented with everything from Arthritis, Bursitis, Tendinitis, Baker's cyst to the less common, Bone tumors and Osgood-Schlatter disease.

In addition, the recommended treatments are all non-specific and generic enough to avoid any litigation for providing wrong diagnoses or improper treatment.

That was quite interesting and at close to 4:30 AM accompanied with my second coffee even keeps my attention. It serves no purpose for my present question, as I have no idea what it could be, as I have never had a problem before.

My eyes see the link, http://www.webmd.com/, jackpot, WebMD, the Holy Grail of medical knowledge for the common person who never spent a quarter of a million dollars on a medical education.

Reading the symptoms is promising,

Pain, soreness, or tenderness, Stiffness or locking, Swelling or bruising, Snapping, popping, or grinding, then it strikes me, nothing even remotely related to my initial question, I finish up going through the treatments, which once again appears to by attorney speak for, these are generic, we don’t know, can’t tell, not libel, call your physician cheapskate.

Changing the wording to, sudden, severe pain in both knees , The quest continues through Dogpile, a combination of all the better search engines, which does manage to display a few the others, did not, or I was too tired and preoccupied to see. Gout, now there is one I did not think of, but I cannot detect swelling, I read it anyway, interesting actually.

Continuing my journey of knee pain discovery I go through Yahoo, , Ask, The outgrew Jeeves and I think the Butler was cooler on the site. AlltheWeb, AltaVista, as well as MSM.com Live Search and a multitude of medical search engines I discover along the way, all the same, a few extra here and a few less there, some bells and whistles and a few down and dirty get the information out. Algorithms may change, but a search is a search, it depends how one wants to read the information displayed to them.

Sitting back, I find myself frustrated, full of questions and sleepy. The knees are not as they were when they awoke me either, calmed down a bit, Bengay or the pain medication, one of them seems to be helping.

What have I learned from this experience? Thinking hard I decided, I learned absolutely nothing. The sites have legal fears and purposefully do not stray near nor cross that legal doublespeak. However, I did learn that putting Bengay on the affected area, taking pain medication, drinking coffee, (not quite sure on that one, but I enjoyed the coffee) and keeping your mind occupied for an hour or so takes the issues and pain out of the thoughts and even feels a bit better. I also learned that writing about the whole thing was nice, shared something with friends and not one is ticked for me waking them up early.

With that statement, I think I will reset my alarm for 7:00 AM and go back to bed.