The Knees That Didn't Work

 There's nothing in our bodies that is not connected with a long list of other things in our body, all of which are connected to even more of our body parts. The old spiritual that said the knee bone was connected to the ankle bone, etc., etc., etc. had it right, and whatever happens to one bone affects all the others.

But the connections go waaaay beyond our bones. Let me tell you a story.

A drunk driver slammed into my parents' car when I was a baby. Doctors pronounced me to be just fine, but I wasn't even close to fine. For one thing, my thyroid gland didn't work. For another, neither did my adrenal glands. When those two major players aren't in the game, you're in trouble. Big trouble.

And all those connections that nobody knows about come into play. By the time I was twelve, my knees didn't work well. If I joined the neighborhood gang for a friendly game of softball, one trip around the bases was all it took for me to end up with knees the size of large grapefruits, and hurting like you can't believe. For days.

And that's when the snap, crackle and pop noises started. By my twenties, going down stairs, as my knees made all sorts of unpleasant noises with each step, embarrassed me. People made comments about the racket.

I started wearing elastic knee braces, hoping they would contain the noise. They didn't.

An orthopedic surgeon said the synovial fluid, the viscous fluid that kept my knees lubricated, was gone. It would never come back, and I would end up in a wheel chair.

Well, I was getting a lot of that "abandon hope all ye who enter here" talk from various doctors, so I decided it was up to me. I didn't know what I could do, but somebody had to do something, and I appeared to be the only one willing to try.

I started by learning more about nutrition, both food and supplements. It took a very long time, but, step by step, life improved.

I wasn't freezing cold all the time. My energy started to come back; sleeping my life away was no longer necessary. My eyes weren't puffy, at least most of the time (thyroid). The dark circles went away (adrenals). My blood sugar didn't live in the basement anymore, which helped my brain a lot. And on, and on, and on.

Hope showed up more frequently. Hope is a truly wonderful thing.

One day, poking around in a dresser drawer, I came across my knee braces, and I realized I didn't need them anymore. In fact, I hadn't needed them for a while, but, focused on all the other good news I was experiencing, I hadn't noticed.

I don't know what part of my nutrition agenda did the trick, and I'm happy to report my knee problems never returned. Now I'm a grandmother, and my knees still work "like butter." No swelling, no pain, and no noise.

What does a concussion have to do with bad knees? If you want a schematic of all the interactions that cause the problem, and those that fix the problem, you've come to the wrong place.

But I can tell you my results-knees and all the rest-came from the only weapon I had to fight the battle: Nutrition.

At one point, a doctor prescribed natural thyroid, and that helped. But when I added nutrition, it helped a whole lot more. I'm really grateful I decided to learn how nutrition could help my body.

Especially since nobody knows how a concussion creates all the mayhem it does. Doctors don't have a clue. They keep scanning brain waves with electroencephalogram after electroencephalogram, but find no solutions.

Fixing starts when we realize the brain is only a symptom of what's going on. The problems that need fixing are all the unknown connections that jumped into the fray.

And we'll never know what they are. Every single body since the beginning of time has been unique-and so are the connections that happen when a body tries to heal itself.

We never know what's going on in our body, but our body does. It knows every single thing that's out of balance and what's needed to get back in balance.

And it tells us via symptoms. Since we don't realize that symptoms are messages from our body, we ignore them or complain about them.

We need to learn the language of symptoms to be able to help our bodies heal, and that's what I write about. That's what got me out of the ditch, and now I share my research.