Falling Apart

Okay, so yesterday I went to the orthopedic to get my knee examined. I've known for years I've had Chondromalacia Patella, which is just another word for "screwed up knee". I messed it up years ago by too much weight lifting & exercise. So now I'm stuck with this knee due to taking care of myself too much. It's been bothering me more than usual, probably because I push people around on gurneys and stand during surgical procedures all day long most days. It's been swelling up and causing me quite a bit of pain. Sometimes I can't squat, which interferes with proper body mechanics while lifting, which plays havoc on my back. So, anyway, I wanted to see the ortho guy so he could give me his opinion on my knee. Wanna know his words? "We start falling apart after a while" was his official diagnosis. Yeah, he diagnosed osteoarthritis, gave me a steroid injection in my knee, and carried on some superficial conversation to distract me while he was injecting, but the message I got was this: "You're getting old, lady...it happens to us all." So now the option I'm left with is whether or not I want to get chicken fluid, extracted from chicken's "combs", injected into my knee. It's called Hylan GF-20...and it's basically injected to increase the fluid in the knee so bone won't be rubbing on bone quite so much, hopefully causing a "cushioning" effect. I don't know about injecting chicken substance into my knee. All I can see is some guy in the lab sitting hunch-backed over a chicken's neck, which has already been chopped off, extracting this wonderful substance from that red, fleshy, bizarre-looking thing that sticks up and flaps over a chicken's head. Who was the first one to think, "Hey, I think I'll take a sample of this chicken's red, fleshy, bizarre-looking thing's insides to see what it contains?" I know the guy. He' s dressed in a white lab coat, with a green polka-dotted bow tie, thick black glasses, & pock marks from a history of a bad case of acne as a pubescent. You know him, too. He's the guy who sat alone in biology class trying to come up with a plan for liver failure. He was my partner, actually, who ended up being a geriatric proctologist. He lives alone & he still wears a bow tie. He spends his Friday nights searching for research articles on thrombosed hemorrhoid's. He's got black, greasy hair that separates into long, stringy strands, and his breath smells like formaldehyde, probably from those chicken's red, fleshy, bizarre-looking things, which from now on will only remind me of how old I'm getting & how "we start falling apart after a while". Darn those chickens....I always knew I didn't like them for some reason.