I’m always thrilled to see a new, lower number on the scale! I’m 96.8 pounds down, now, and just 3.2 more pounds until I meet my end-of-year goal of 100 pounds. Realistically, that’s the equivalent of a squirrel’s weight!

And none too soon, either. I had an experience last weekend that left me worried.

Thank goodness — I’ve lost Snooki! I can’t help but think that’s a good thing!

While I’ve seen improvement in nearly every physical way, my biggest health concern is my knees. I have severe arthritis in both; much more severe in my right knee. The damage in that knee is bad enough that the joint has degraded and become misaligned. I was told at least six years ago, probably longer, that I’d need total knee replacement surgery; likely on both knees, eventually, because of the brutal combination of osteoarthritis and extreme weight.

I’ve done a lot of things to delay the inevitable, from arthroscopic surgery to remove bone spurs (and trim a torn meniscus), orthovisc injections in both knees to replace synovial fluid (and provide a cushion to my knees), to custom-made braces to help correct the misalignment issue and powerful NSAIDs to reduce pain and inflammation.

Without a doubt, the absolute best thing I have done for my knees is to lose weight. Although I still cannot stand for long or walk extended distances, losing weight has reduced the amount of chronic pain I deal with. It really does help to “take a load off”! Whodathunkit?!

That was… until last weekend, when I finally realized that the pain I was experiencing wasn’t the normal fluctuation of good/bad days that you deal with when you have arthritis. No, the pain was excruciating enough to restrict my movement to a point where I feared I’d need to visit my knee doc. And I know what he’d suggest, because his staff has been telling me every time I go in that I need to (a) lose the weight and (b) get that nifty new knee. Clearly, I’ve done one of the two.

The level of pain scared me. I have known for a long time that if I continued down the course I was headed, I would reach a point where I wouldn’t be able to function at all — and I was in no shape to have major surgery; the risk factors for the morbidly obese are a concern, as well as recovery. I have worked hard to get the weight off, and my goal is to get as much of as I can — a minimum of 60 more pounds, at the very least — before I consider surgery. I have planned how I want to approach this, and I feared that choice was about to be taken away from me.

The good news is that after a few days of nursing the knee to reduce inflammation and treating it more like an injury instead of standard arthritis, my knee feels as good as it did before it was injured. (I’m not sure what I did to injure it; the pain was different, but I assumed it was an arthritis flare-up.)

In addition to this, I’ve needed the reminder that I need to stay focused on doing everything I can for my body; not just for me, but for others, as well. Getting healthy is a gift; not just to myself but to people I love and care for, because they are affected when I am not doing well. I’m fortunate to have a large support group of friends and family who are pulling for me, and I owe it to them to keep my head in the game and keep pushing as hard as I can toward my real goal: gaining health.

I know it’s against the odds, but I plan to turn that upside down.