Gnarly Knee Pictures You Will NOT Believe!!!

Live! New! Knee!

It’s hard truly understanding one’s impulses. Like ordering a burrito when I have food at home, or playing another chess game when I’m on a deadline, I don’t know why I get the urge to send a picture of my latest gruesome injury to the group chat. I do ask before. But if I’m being honest, I don’t wait for consensus, it just takes one or two people saying “for sure bro”—it’s sent. To share what is horrifying and paining me with someone healthy, eliciting some sympathy. Or perhaps it is some form of pathetic sadism—to make a friend imagine the pain, squirming for a second as a phantom tickle reaches an otherwise normal limb. Or, galaxy brain incoming, it is altruism. The oddly satisfying/borderline ASMR feeling of seeing a medical procedure in process. 

In February I tore my ACL playing basketball with a bunch of adults in a YMCA gym in Beaverton, Oregon that is mostly known as the place where local middle schoolers learned to freak dance. My road to recovery meant surgery, surgery meant Oxy, Oxy meant playing Baldur’s Gate and Chess for 10+ hours a day, playing Baldur’s Gate and Chess all day meant sitting on a chair on my porch on the first sunny spring day, sitting on my porch meant having a conversation with my neighbor about being addicted to Oxy when he tore his ACL, that conversation meant thinking about him saying “hey you really do need to take them, but they’re not candy, even if the doctor hands them out like it’s Halloween.” Thinking about Halloween meant thinking about my leg as a gruesome costume to stoke the fear of mortality in my friends.

If my friends get to watch me hobble with a limp, a crutch, and a massive knee locking brace, then make sarcastic comments like “Cam used to be so full of life, verve, vitality, now look at him, it makes you sick.” Then I think I deserve to indulge some of the inner monster that is only satisfied by my own suffering and the suffering of my friends. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve given up the Oxy. Sending these pictures is the only medicine that works.¹ 

Now we’re here. Leg propped up, doing my little physical therapy stretches. My left leg looks comically tiny compared to my right, but more or less the pain is gone. The path is clear: I finished Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, haven’t finished Baldur’s Gate 3 yet,² my chess ELO is fluctuating between 700-800 Rapid,³ I can’t fully straighten my leg but I can bend it enough to finally complete a full rotation on an exercise bike. 

Am I alone? I think not. In a sports group chat I’m in, one of the most prolific posters⁴ decided to post the surgical images of his colonoscopy without warning, which horrified some and satiated others. A divisive decision that leads it to be brought up anytime someone overshares or posts something gross or horny that some didn’t want to see. Pulling a <insert poster’s name here>.

However, for you dear reader, I leave you with a content warning. Well less a content warning and more of a First Paywall. Pay me any amount of money⁵ and I will share with you the exclusive gnarly gnee pictures of my ACL tendon being torn down and built back up from scratch. They’re hot. They’re gross. They’re live. They’re nude. They’re not able to fully function yet. The Poor Things of knee tendons. Enjoy.