Russ has kindly let me speak for myself today. I am Russ’ right knee. He has been complaining about me since he was in High School. It is not my fault that he has so many problems with me—it is from his own carelessness over the years. I want you to hear my side of it all.
Back in 1964, during that summer, Russ and his brothers built a dam across Wolf Creek at his grandfather’s farm west of Cushing. The creek was too low to fill the swimming hole, so the four brothers worked like beavers shoveling and piling brush, dirt, logs and such coming from each side of the creek to dam it up. The middle of the dam kept washing out, so they took an old stock tank, filled the bottom with sand and made it the center of the dam.
The stock tank had a bar across the middle. To cross the creek, Russ would walk the earthen part, jump to the middle of the tank where a narrow bar spanned it, and then onto the other earthen end. He slipped one day and came down hard on me—cutting a 2 inch gash deeply into the knee. I bleed profusely until Dr. Riegel sewed me shut and things seemed to be going well.
That fall in HS football practice, my cut opened up again twice and Russ blamed me for quitting football—just because the coach wouldn’t let him even practice until I was fully healed up.
In 1988, he tried to ski down the steepest hill at Welch Village ski hill near Redwing. He didn’t have his bindings adjusted right, and tumbled badly tearing out my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Well, the doctor said he should repair me totally by having a replacement ACL grafted in, but no, he chose to do some leg weight lifting to strengthen my other parts instead of fixing me right. Now I was a little loose in my main joint, so I twinged him often to remind him of his poor choice. But, we got along pretty good for the next 22 years.
Then in Nov of 2010, he was up on a ladder, working on a roof and tumbled down, landing first on me. Without my ACL, my upper bone shifted and turned a little, acting like a wedge to split my lower bone and leaving a big dent. They rushed him and me down to Mayo where they repaired all the leg bone damage, but said “We will have to wait for the leg to heal completely before fixing the knee.”
So again I was ignored! I wasn’t happy at all. Instead of an occasional twinge to let him know, I gave him a real jolt often enough he finally went in to Mayo again last Deember to start getting me fixed right! But it is too late to fix me—instead he is getting rid of me and replacing me with a metal knee. Good bye cruel world.
