Wow. What the heck am I going to do. So I've got this thing called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome type 3, and the deal with it is as follows: All of my connective tissue is weaker than it's supposed to be. Ok, so I've got this thing, I have more hernias than normal people, and I'm really flexible. However, there is a more serious issue at hand. I have a deformed left knee. The kneecap isn't shaped right to fit into a groove in my leg bones (I think my femur) and furthermore, the groove isn't even there to begin with. This happened because my knee wasn't being held in place right since birth really... because my connective tissue, as said, is weak. So, now I've got this deformed left knee, the cartilage between the patella and the femur is wearing veyr thin, and as soon as it goes, I face arthritic pain until a patellectomy (removal of the kneecap.) At which point some tendon starts wearing down, and eventually becomes painful in an of itself. So, I was talking to a doctor today, and there are really two options. One of them doesn't count however because it's apparently only been done twice or something, and in both cases, it failed. This procedure involved taking a chunk out of the kneecap, from the middle, rebuilding the kneecap with screws to make it a better shape, and then taking that chunk of bone and jamming it into my femur to make a grove for the kneecap to rest in. This results in tremendous pain and no real benefit.
The other option however, although still not terribly wonderful, is as follows. They do a procedure that involves cutting and re-attatching my tibia from where it is to where it should be, taking some tendon from my lower leg and stringing it over or through or something my patella in order to stabilize it. What this results in is my kneecap now centered on top of a flat area in my leg. Ideally, this causes wear and tear to stop, and I go on to a happy healthy life. Of course.. that's a 10% chance occurence, as was estimated for me by my doctor. There's a 50% chance of reducing wear and tear, which is good enough. That situation ends up with me having the cartildge wear out a lot longer from now, having the patellectomy later, and therefore by the time I am in a situation where I have a lot of pain and there would be no solution other than an artificial knee, an artificial knee will be reasonable... of course, by that time (~40-50 years) there may have been some breakthroughs in technology, and I'll be healed.
And there's the other 50%. The situation where I end up in varying degrees of lowered mobility and/or pain.
What am I going to do? I can't really wait. I don't know if I have faith in medicine.
