Surprise diagnosis

Yesterday morning I had my followup visit with my orthopedic specialist to find out the results of the testing I've been going through.  Everybody, including myself, felt certain he was going to say that the severe weakness in my right quad was disc related.  You have no idea how surprised I was when he sat down in front of me and "Dave, your problem is arthritis."  Evidently it's fairly severe and needs to be taken care of fairly soon.  Looking back now, there were symptoms, but I always chalked them up to low back pain.  I do move around a lot of 5 gallon buckets of paint, and, as one of my friends said "you're no longer 20."  

The walls are painted Williamsburg Blue and I don't like that color

And it also seems that at this point the best solution is to have surgery.  This is life.  You have a problem?  You get it fixed.  I could putz around for a while and it would only get worse.  He could give me a shot that would only be a short term fix because the arthritis is there and it's not going to go away.

I told him that I'd gone on a 3 month Leave of Absence which was set to expire on June 20 and he said that was a realistic date.  So I'm expecting to be back to work then, part-time of course, and with restrictions.  On the bright side, it looks as though I won't be hauling around any 5 gallon buckets for quite a while.