Eddie Arana, Rick Thibodeau, & Chris Bakunas San Diego, Ca. March 2012

Eddie Arana, Rick Thibodeau, & Chris Bakunas San Diego, Ca. March 2012
Eddie Arana, Rick Thibodeau, & Chris Bakunas at Luche Libre Taco Shop in San Diego, March 2012

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Tapping A Knee Effusion (Draining Water On The Knee) Warning! Sorta Kinda Graphic


A few weeks back I posted a pick of my swollen right knee and wrote about having incurred a knee effusion, more commonly known as water on the knee. Like the idiot I am, I thought I would be able to ride out this slightly uncomfortable condition until it went away...like, by magic.

I was wrong.

The condition became quite a bit more uncomfortable as the swelling increased, until my knee was so stiff it felt as if an extremely strong gnome had its arms wrapped around my knee and was constricting it in a bear hug meant to kill.

So I went to my Doctor, whose hands are pictured above along with a very large syringe.


In the next photograph we see that Dr. O. has jabbed the turkey baster into my knee just above my knee cap. This is known as tapping the knee, or joint aspiration, or draining the knee to those in the medical field.

It is known as the Uma Thurman Pulp Fiction experience to those of us undergoing the procedure.


Here we see a second tube of fluid being slowly extracted from my knee into a 20cm disposable plastic syringe (invented in 1956 by New Zealander Colin Murdoch, replacing the re-usable all-glass syringe that was invented ten years earlier by the Englishman Chance Brothers).

Dr. O. told me he usually withdraws 10cm to 30cm of fluid on average, but I have big knees...



At the end of the procedure Dr. O. had removed five and a half 20cm tubes of fluid from my knee (the half full tube is being sent out for analysis). That's 110cms of fluid...yikers.

The procedure was amazingly quick and painless and immediately afterward my knee felt 90% better. There is still a little stiffness as of this morning, but I can now at least walk without doing a Festus impression.

The great news is the fluid was clear, without any signs of blood or those pesky crystals that are indications of gout. However, Dr. O. wants to get an X-ray done, along with the fluid analysis, to see if there is an underlying factor in the knee effusion other than overuse.

Oh, and he wants me to lose weight... a lot of weight.

Yay that. Just yay.

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