From the hip joint...to the knee joint

School has started with a rush! No orientation for second years, tragically...plunge in head first!

I'm enjoying being back and learning so many new neat things! I'm also somewhat grieving the loss of freedom, as well, as now, every minute of every day has expectations placed on it.

This weekend I'm going camping, though, so that will be a nice first weekend! If I stay at home, the entire long weekend will be filled with packing for my move the following week, and with homework. That's just not right for the first week back! So camping it is...

Here's a neat discovery I made today! On a couple of occasions I've known people who had severe knee pain, but the doctors could not figure out what was wrong with the knee! It was finally realized in both of these cases that the injury was actually not in the knee, but rather in the hip. Today I learned the reason that that happens. One of the nerves of the leg is called the obturator nerve. It innervates both the hip joint and the knee joint. So trauma or injury to the hip travels to the brain in the same nerve as that from the knee, and the brain can sometimes mix up the signals and interpret hip pain as knee pain - or vise versa. It's a concept called referred pain, which actually happens more frequently than I ever realized!