Nothing’s Wrong, Says the System

During the accident, I must have slammed my left knee pretty hard on the inside. When I woke up, there was a missing chunk of skin about three by three inches, and a whole lot of swelling. Fluid had pooled around the knee and crept up into my lower inner thigh.

In the ER.
In the ICU.
In medical rehab.

Nobody seemed particularly concerned about the knee itself.

They’d done X-rays. Nothing broken. Case closed.

What did concern them, deeply, obsessively, was wound care. And good god, the medical system can fixate on the dumbest shit sometimes. I don’t care about wound care beyond one thing: infection prevention. That’s it. I don’t give a single fuck if there’s a scar when it’s healed. I just want it healed.

Discharge day comes, and I go stay with my best friend because she has a single-story house. Logical, considering I was in a wheelchair at the time. I noticed the knee occasionally, but it always got shoved to the bottom of the list. I had too many other appointments, too many specialists, too much bullshit to juggle.

That is, until I went to a clinic to establish a primary care physician, something I’d never really needed, since I already see half the medical profession every year. That doctor told me the same thing someone in rehab had said: My body would absorb the fluid.

That’s fucking interesting.

Because growing up, if you had fluid under the skin, you drained it. Didn’t matter what it was. Blister? Pop it. Clean it. Move on. And for those who want to lecture about “optimal healing,” I assure you, kind sir, you’ve never had a blister and then had to be back at work the next morning. When that’s the situation, draining it is optimal.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. I start pushing it. I’m hobbling around on my left heel, even though the doctors haven’t cleared me for weight-bearing. They wanted me to wait another six weeks—which, coincidentally, was the soonest they could fucking see me again.

My body needed to move. It screamed for it. So I moved.

Now I’m home, and the fluid is still there. When I stand, it rushes around my knee and hurts. When I roll onto my right side to sleep, it migrates into my inner thigh and hurts. It sloshes. It reminds me it exists. Constantly.

So I decide: someone needs to drain this shit.

First stop: urgent care. They tell me at the desk they “can’t do that” and that I need to go to the ER. I politely point out that this doesn’t seem like an emergency, and that it’s ridiculous they can’t handle something doctors routinely do in offices.

Doesn’t matter. Bureaucracy wins. I lose. I leave.

Urgent care number two?
Same fucking answer.

So, against my better judgment, I drive myself to the ER.

At check-in, I tell them straight up: this wasn’t my idea. I get my blood pressure taken, answer the questions, wait. Eventually they send me for X-rays again. Fine. Then I sit in the exam room for another two hours, because of course I do, it’s the ER.

Finally, the doctor comes in.

Nothing’s really wrong, he says.
Here’s an antibiotic prescription, he says.
And that’s that.

The fluid is still there. Sloshing around. Doing knee-fluid things. And you know what? It just feels… wrong. In the same way this entire medical system feels wrong.

Blind compliance stacked on top of bureaucracy. A business model where the customer is always wrong, but if you want to get fixed, there’s only one game in town.

So you fucking wait.