White-Hot Stabbing Sensation Under Kneecap Probably Nothing Serious
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A local runner is experiencing severe pain in his left knee, Dumb Runner has learned, but it’s probably nothing serious.
Jeff Gillooly, 36, was just one mile in to an 8-mile run at Kerrigan Park when the pain first appeared, apparently out of the blue.
“Ouch,” Gillooly thought to himself. “What the hell?”
Opting to ignore the pain, Gillooly continued his run. But the sensation only worsened, morphing quickly from a momentary pang to a near-crippling spasms of agony, piercing his patella with each foot strike like a knitting needle that’s just been pulled from the bubbling lava of a tropical volcano.
The pain, Gillooly told himself, will probably go away on its own.
Ignoring his own body’s warning signs is not a new phenomenon for Gillooly, who started running about two years ago and has been hurt for most of that time. He has a history of returning to his running routine before he’s fully recovered from an injury, sources told Dumb Runner.
“(Jeff) is a real tough guy,” said one friend, who asked to remain anonymous. “When he gets injured, he figures he’ll just ‘run it off.’”
If that is Gillooly’s strategy now, it isn’t working—the pain, which obviously is there to stay, is burning with the heat of a thousand suns and feels alternately like his ligaments are being bitten by a snake with razor fangs that inject not venom but battery acid, or as though a family of scorpions had somehow miniaturized themselves and had traveled through his body, Fantastic Voyage-style; made their way to his left knee; and taken turns stinging his anterior cruciate ligament, viciously and repeatedly, as they goaded each other on.
“OK, mile five,” Gillooly said to himself, at last report. “Only three to go.”
