I woke up one morning with a red, swollen knee that alarmed me enough to go to my doctor. During the exam, he got stressed and asked, “Are you having chest pains or trouble breathing?”

Confused, I shrugged, and told him, “No, I just thought I might’ve hurt my leg.”

“We need you to go to the hospital right now, this looks like a blood clot,” he exclaimed. “We will call you an ambulance!”

An ambulance? A blood clot? I felt fine, so I opted to drive the block to the hospital. Once inside, the reality that it was 5 p.m. on a Friday during flu season set in. I ended up waiting seven hours surrounded by coughing fits and growing increasingly freaked about having a ticking time bomb of a blood clot inside me.

Finally, I got a bed and around 3 a.m. the doc had an answer. “No blood clot,” she said. “But you broke a bone behind your knee, a rare one. I wonder how, since it’s not a common break.” Hearing that, I knew. A couple of nights earlier, exploring new sexual positions, my partner twisted my knee in a weird way and I heard a pop.

Embarrassed about my injury, I told her that it likely happened during a weight-bearing exercise requiring kneeling. The most painful thing was breaking the news about my broken bone to my boyfriend. He felt absolutely terrible.
—Maida Glass