Hooray for Hyaluronic Acid

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Since baseball season has started, I have been playing softball and coaching two kids’ teams.  Needless to say, I have been sore.  Without Alleve (Naproxin), which can give you ulcers in large doses/long, continuous usage, I would not be able to function by Sunday night.  I would be hobbling around on my aching knees.  In the first kids’ practice of the year, I heard and felt a snap in the front of my right knee as I pitched to the kids.  This knee has been hurting so much that I have been limping at work during the week and considering going to an ortho Dr. to get scoped or MRI’d or whatever it is they do there.  I hate Doctoring, I might add.  I don’t want to get caught up in the “victim-mentality” of over-doctoring.  It’s a vortex.  It can take over your life.  I realize and accept that as we age, we will be uncomfortable.  I also realize and accept that our time here is limited and we need to wade into life and make the most of it for ourselves and to teach and help others (ie kids).  So I plug on just like any other forty-something year old.  Some days I feel 35.  Some days I feel 50.  Gotta get out there.

Well this weekend, I was making fun of my dad for all the vitamins and supplements he is taking.  I picked up a bottle out of his drawer of stuff and said, “…what is this stuff?  Hyaluronic Acid?  Huh?”.  Now dad is not an easily influenced guy, but he did cure his macular degeneration with vitamins.  It’s one of the very curable maladies if you take the right stuff.  So that led into his buying catalogs and trying a lot of other supplements, I suppose.  That’s natural.  So he said to me that the hyaluronic acid was found in abundance in children, but that older folks lose it somehow.  It is related to connective tissue.  “Ok”, I said, and I popped one.  He then gave me 5 or 6 more to take home, as his were running low.

I forgot about it.  I didn’t put any stock into it.  That day, I had stayed after work and shagged balls with my boss.  I hit him grounders at 3rd, and he hit me some OF flies.  He left and I ran sprints.  I went hard.  I SHOULD have been a zombie the next day from that.  But I felt like superman.  My knee, for the first time in weeks, was not giving me any trouble.  It was as if the clock was turned back 5 years.  Am I just getting into shape and it all gelled on Saturday morning, all at once?  Possibly, sure.  But I am taking (and ordering more) Hyaluronic Acid for the forseable future.