Texting with a friend this morning as I sit on the patio watching this small flock of six red star chickens who are growing so fast, after giving carrots and apples to the horses and donkeys on the other side of the fence I told her: this is a soothing I forgot existed in the world.
I am four months and a few days post total right hip replacement. I am days away from going in for total knee replacement on my left knee.
Since 2010 I dealt with excruciating pain in my hip after a car accident that accelerated already developing arthritis. As the hip deteriorated my life got smaller and smaller. In 2014, my contract and the team I built were part of a reduction in force and severed from the large oil and gas company I’d been a contractor with for 5 years. That and my youngest child graduating college set me on an identity crisis that was made worse by the unbelievable pain I was in on a daily basis. A few things happened. I was abruptly faced with facing the things I had pushed out of my line of view for years; a terrible divorce from a violent man and my deeply flawed way of managing the rage I didn’t know what to do with after that good decision. The physical pain and not dealing with it while I had resources to deal with it (classic, I’ll get to it) and suddenly with no safety net not having the resources to deal with it. My children kindly supported me through a situation they should never have been put in. My coping took all the classic turns. Isolation. Alcohol. Food. Anger. Deep depression. Mostly anger.
This hip surgery has changed a lot of things. I can physically feel the darkness leaving me. There are a lot of things I am facing head on now that will take time to deal with. I will occasionally write about my health - both mental and physical - and I’ll write about post knee surgery changes so I can look back and see how big the changes are. Because they are very big. I’ll start with the sense of darkness lifting.
Pain messes with every aspect of life. Chronic severe pain takes that to another level. With the hip replacement, I initially said 90% of the pain in my body was immediately gone. That was true for weeks and I don’t yet have perfect words to describe the levels of internal sighing and relaxing my body has been able to enjoy so I will probably write about it a few times to get it right. There have been so many days I can be silent and feel a real physical change in my mind along with the wonderful change in my body-to describe the clearing away of a cloud is one way I can put it in words. It’s been that feeling you get when you’re out on a great day but it’s cloudy and when the cloud moves away, the heat and light from the sun lifts your soul into this elated state. I’ve been holding on to that feeling and loving it very much. The depth of despair was something I adapted to as the pain persisted. I often felt hopeless.
And, as I am a human and humans are both adaptable and never static, over these weeks my left knee, which has taken on the burden of supporting my overweight body all these years let me know it needed help too. So I’m getting that taken care of. I want to record this time because no matter how many years I have left to live, this moment is pivotal and I love it.
More soon.
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