Stamps: Amy Groshek

Fort Healthcare, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin

By Amy Groshek

The judo lesson cost $12. I’ll pay over $10,000 as 20% of surgery costs alone if I use an out-of-network provider, so my father drives me 40 miles outside of Madison for the MRI.

I change out of my clothes, wait 30 minutes, hungry, my knee swelling. I go off on crutches in search of a restroom, accidentally dipping the ties of the medical gown in the toilet.

It offends the technician that I want copies of the images. There’s no need: the radiologist will read them at the hospital.

“That’s fine,” I say, “I want a second opinion.”

I didn’t need a doctor to feel the profundity of the damage, and I don’t need a doctor to point it out on the MRI: the femur unnaturally posterior; the marbled anchor of the ACL, and where it ascends,  not a thin black band of ligament but a sprung, cottony mass.

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Amy Groshek would really like to walk.

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