Folks on Facebook are familiar with the term Throwback Thursday, where people post pics from their past. It’s usually meant in fun.

I had a Fallback Wednesday, and it wasn’t a fun one. Nor was it on Facebook.

It was in my own back yard, during my morning walk with Bonnie, my dog. We have a normal path we take before breakfast; her, so she can do her morning thing. Me, to put in a few steps before breakfast. We’re fully into fall weather, now; it was brisk out, first thing in the morning, with plenty of newly fallen leaves to kick through — which is what I inadvertently did.

Stunt leaves that may or may not look like leaves in my yard.

It wasn’t anything more than nudging a stick with my toe in passing, but that’s all it took to push my knee out of alignment. When that happens, I can’t straighten my knee and I can’t put weight on it. To complicate things further, I was wearing a new brace that had partially slid out of place (and might have contributed a bit). So there I was, standing on one leg like a ticked off flamingo, leash in hand with a dog ready to take on the rest of our walk, 50 feet from the door.

It might as well have been 50 miles at that moment.

I haven’t had this happen, lately, except for a couple little minor skirmishes. I had convinced myself that building muscle around my knees has helped, as well as losing close to 150 pounds. And they have; the number of incidents of my knee locking up like this has gone down considerably, and it had been many months since I’d dealt with even the hint of it, so this caught me completely off-guard. I managed to hobble into the house, but between aggravating it and not being able to straighten it for several hours, I’ve been dealing with a throwback in time of a kind that I’m certainly not happy about in the least.

I’ve been pretty happy with my progress, doing away with having to use a travel wheelchair, and then a cane, and lately, walking around 6500 steps a day. It took one tiny incident to send me backward to a time when I couldn’t hobble around my own house without some sort of mobility assistance. Add to this, my surgery date has been kicked back six months. Maybe my knee knows I’m going to evict it.

After considerable pain and feeling sorry for myself, I realized that this was my lot every single day just a couple of years ago — and it wasn’t so long ago that I was dependent on a cane just to get around the house, dealt with debilitating pain to the point that I had to take breaks to sit down just to get through washing dishes by hand, and had developed all sorts of ways to get by because of my knees.

Mind you, it’s on the mend, now. I still need to take it easy for a few more days, by the feel of things, but the difference between then and now is huge. I am both physically and mentally stronger than I was just a couple years ago. I laid down to put my knee up, after taking some heavy duty pain reliever, and then got mad for having to do it. I don’t want to be waylaid, when even a couple of years ago, having the excuse to put my feet up for a few days was a welcome thing. Now, it frustrates the hell out of me.

I suppose that’s a good thing, right? It’s a reality check to remember a time when every day brought me pain and difficulty. Now, it’s a hiccup, not a way of life. I just made the commitment last week to get a new brace to support my knee so I can increase my steps — and then this? Oh, nope! I’m not going to let this sideline me. I will continue to fight with everything I’ve got.

PS: Just to be clear, it’s not the fault of the brace, although having it move on me while I walked may have contributed. I have experience with braces, so understand the issues at hand.