On Day One back home we went to see the doctor. Well, Cortisone had worked before, let's try that, he said. But no, this time the Cortisone did nothing.

Dodie, who had been so tough for a year, began to whimper quite a bit. The pain was now starting to go off the scale.  So the doctors began to roll out the drugs - the kind of stuff you can make a profit with by selling to people under the bridge. But the effect was minimal. They tried changing up the formulas. "Lyrica", for example, is not a narcotic but has some other sort of action. It may have helped a bit.

This is when the hospital announced that Dodie's left knee surgery now had a date - August 20! But now of course it was the right that was the most troublesome. One silly GP gave the opinion that it would have to be the left anyway, presumably because they had already ordered a "left", on Amazon. A visit to the orthopedic surgeon put an end to that. When we walked in, she had the xrays of both sides up on the wall. "These knees are both crap!", she exclaimed, with somewhat less than usual decorum. "So we'll do the right first and the left as soon as the right has recovered".