Getting an MRI on my knee - extreme pain last 3 weeks

Tried to get to the doctor last week but could barely walk it was so bad. The old war wound has been playing up something bad. One of those ironic circumstances where you need to see your doctor but are too sick to see them :s

This goes back years ago to my working in printing for so many years. My job at the end of it was on a guillotine. This involved constantly lifting and turning, putting large amounts of paper into the guillotine to slice it down to A4 size (that's standard metric letter size for those in the US - 297mm by 210mm). 

The guillotine, paper on the right from off the press on the lifter, chopped paper on the left pallet lifter

Cripes that picture brings back a lot of memories..... The green plastic recycling bin on the right of the guillotine table was where the paper offcuts would go. The guillotine table has an air bed which squirts out air so the paper almost floats. The whole thing has a little computer where you can make and store up to 200 programs of specific jobs that would be repeated. Cut sizes, when the air bed turns off or on, etc.

It was my right knee that did a lot of the twisting in the lifting and eventually got so worn I ended up in extreme pain. They had me treated there on premises at their gym with the gym guy using that electric thing that relaxes muscles along with some exercises, and eventually it got better. But it was never the same after that. The human body just wasn't designed to be treated like this.

So now it's flared up and gone bung again. For three weeks now very painful. Saw my GP today who's been very good at diagnosing things in my experience. He wants an MRI done, but he thinks it may be a torn cartilage. I talked to David about it when I got home, him being a rehab nurse, who said the only thing to do with a cartilage is to wait for it to heal. Thank fuck no operation! 

Hope it is just a cartilage as suspected. It has been getting slowly better, but as the progress is so slow it can be almost imperceptible.

Booked the MRI for Monday afternoon, all covered by Medicare. Thank you Medicare :)