Anyone who knows my wonderful girlfriend also know that she is a workaholic to a fault. With that said, she twisted out both of her knees terribly in shovelling snow a couple days ago. They now pop with practically every move, they are swollen, and her motions are all very stiff and cause her a good deal of discomfort, if not just straight-up pain.
On this past Saturday, after the first 20+ inches of snow that fell, there was a 48-hour lull in the storm. At about 2PM, Tony, her landlord, was out shovelling snow on his tractor with a front-end loader on it. I went outside at about 4PM, which is when I noticed that the snow had stopped and that people were already digging themselves out. I borrowed Tony's snow shovel, and cleared out around Christine's car and shovelled out paths from both doors to her car. Tony's plan was to get the tractor out to the street: in so doing he would clear out the driveway. From there, he could widen it out to get the vehicles out.
At about 5:30, Christine felt guilty for doing her own work indoors while the two of us were outside working, so she grabbed the only shovel left, a spade. We shovelled the path to Tony's house and around his truck, to make room for the tractor to move the majority of the snow without hitting the truck. Christine used the snow shovel that I had while I took breathers, but overall, she ended up using a spade most of the time, so she was at a serious disadvantage. Her whole body was sore, but in particular, her knees were really bothering her. Tony suggested that she stop, because he noticed that she was limping -- I was being my usual unobservant self, so I didn't notice until much later. However, she felt guilty for stopping, because she hadn't shovelled as much or as long as we had (at least, I think that was her rationale). She also felt bad since Tony's wife Veronica wasn't there to help him (Veronica was stuck at her office, snowed in), and thus Christine had to work extra hard to make up for her not being there.
At the end of it all, she hobbled inside in serious amounts of pain in both her legs and her back. A few days later, her knees are still really bothering her, but her back is better. Her knees are actually swollen -- I think she overexerted herself and just pulled something, but she might have actually done some serious damage.
The only benefit to all this is that now I know where she is. If she moves, her position is given away by the sound of cracking knees. Thus she can never sneak up on me.
If that last paragraph sounded morbid, I apologize. I was simply trying to find the humor in this post: there's not much to work with, and I hope that Christine doesn't kill me for posting this.
