Me and Rick

My best friend in grade school was named Ricky. Between third and sixth grades we attended St. Bridget’s in Richmond, Virginia, and though we didn’t live in the same neighborhood, we were best buddies. Memory plays tricks, I know, but I’m pretty sure we were far closer than most young boys tend to be. We talked on the phone a lot, saw each other when we could on weekends, and greatly valued the friendship.

I spent grades seven through nine in Japan and ten in Atlanta, but returned to Richmond in 1964 and Ricky and I picked up just where we left off. During our last two years in high school – different schools this time – we talked most every night and shared our souls with each other.

Rick, as he now prefers to be called, lives in Colorado and I still value his friendship, though we rarely see each other. We did rendezvous in Chicago a few years back and had a great visit.

All this is prelude though, for it was thinking about another Rick that reminded me of my friend.

Rick Santorum called it quits yesterday, suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. I never would have believed it possible that he and I would ever have anything in common, but I too called it quits yesterday, ending my search for a medical solution to my knee problem. “Rick and Walter throw in the towel; homophobe and homosexual both quit” – what a juicy story one could make of that.

I met with an orthopedic surgeon yesterday; not the one who did my knee replacement, but another member of his practice. Like each of the five doctors I’ve seen, he had no explanation for my continued pain and swelling but he did shoot down the popular theory: my body was not reacting well to the material from which this artificial knee was made. I had gone in expecting him to schedule surgery to replace the knee, but he was extremely hesitant to do that, saying that he had no diagnosis on which to operate. He also warned of possible worse consequences of trying to fix something without knowing what was wrong.

So I quit. I’m done. That’s it. No more.

The pain is daily but not constant and, as my mother did before me, I have learned to live with pain. I will likely never enjoy walks in the woods like I used or blithely walk across Manhattan like I used to, but there are plenty of things I still can do and the most important of them is to move on. I am willing to try other therapies and I want to get back into an exercise habit, but the medical route is over. It was a dead-end fourteen months in coming.

The Hippocratic oath famously begins “first, do no harm.” Perhaps the second line should be “then, do no good.”