I had a lot of unexpected joint stuff come up this year. I recently went in to see Ortho for both a knee and a shoulder.
I had an ACL reconstruction 30 years ago. I've had to baby it along the entire time. But this summer, for some reason, it felt like it was 'catching'. Very painful. Kind of like sticking a screwdriver into a door hinge, and then trying to close it and it won't close. Plus it felt like I had a 'rope' on the side of my knee 'catching' whenever I tried to squat down and bend it. This isn't what its done for the last 30yrs. The 3rd party pre-screen company approved an MRI for this (but not the shoulder). The Dr. basically said 'this is what I would expect a knee 30yrs after an ACL reconstruction to look like'. Said it's been bone on bone for a while now, most likely. He was saying that 30yrs ago, with the kind of surgery I had, removing a lot of soft tissue was normal (?). Said there's a good deal of arthritis but that's normal. He never did explain why my knee would start catching and binding (other than arthritis, LOL). He warned me away from getting injections (cortisone maybe?) because he said that's only a short term solution with multiple injections spread out over time, and that it will dissolve what little soft tissue is left. Also, I told him that 99% of the time I don't get pain in my knee. He said that I would need a knee replacement *at some point*, but since 99% of the time it's not very painful his opinion was to wait until it did get painful and I was willing to 'throw in the towel'. So still no idea why it started catching and binding. It's not really binding internally now, and the pain lasted a couple of weeks, but I still feel the 'rope' catching on the side of the knee. So I'm kind of just going to give up on that for now, and if something happens in the future I'll just go right back.
The shoulder flared up right after the knee pain went away. No fucking clue what happened. Everyone kept asking "Well, what did you do to it?" and I have no fucking idea. And every Dr (and physical therapist) seems to think that's weird (because if you hurt your shoulder, you should remember what you did to hurt it, right?). But whatever happened, it was an intense 3 weeks of constant pain and very little sleep. It was just impossible to get comfortable in bed and it took forever to try to find a position where I could sleep for an hour or two before the pain would wake me back up. I made an appt to see my GP, and then one day...the pain just stopped. So by the time I got to see the GP, I couldn't really tell him much and then I was off to see Ortho.
Oddly enough, the company that does the pre-approval for my insurance carrier denied an MRI for the shoulder and had me go to do some PT.
The Dr at Ortho had said he thought it was likely a rotator cuff injury. The physical therapist looked at it, and his opinion is that it was probably a Labrum tear and/or something with the tendon at the top of the biceps. But he thinks that the pain itself was most likely due to inflammation and not a tear or injury inside of my shoulder itself because I guess there's not a lot of pain receptors in the internal gubbins of your joints (I heard this about the knee as well). But a tear or injury could have then caused the inflammation...and once the inflammation went away...so did the pain.
It was also weird how weak I was in a lot of movements in different directions. I'm not a small person. I'm 6'5" in the morning and 6'4" at night, LOL. I don't work out so I don't think I'm strong in an athletic way, but I've done a lifetime of blue-collar work so I also didn't think I was weak. I regularly lift stuff at work off pallets and put it on my workbench, and vice cersa, and that stuff usually weight 100-200lbs, and occasional 250+. But doing the PT, I kept thinking "this fucking rubber band is kicking my ass". Like, the exercises made me legit feel like I was an 80yo man struggling to get off the fucking couch, LOL.
So I can def see what the therapist was saying, in regards to my 'stabilization' strength being bad. And knowing my work, I could easily have torn something lifting something that was too heavy instead of taking the time to sling-hoist it off my bench, and then I spent weeks with the shoulder feeling all 'floppy' and excruciatingly painful.