My left knee was replaced on April 5th 2023. That pain, along with the excruciating pain of my right hip for the last ten years are now gone. Well, the knee gets sore once in a while but that is going away slowly. I logged my recovery for seven weeks so I would remember both the way it felt before and the way it feels now. Because as we adapt to things, our memories fade and I want to remember what was so I can enjoy what is.
I used to live in my son’s home. I now live in the home my son’s fiancé owns, I pay her rent in the form of utilities at the moment. My son, his fiancé and her nephew live in a home a short distance from here. I felt it important to mention that here.
The most significant change is in my mind. There had been a decade of my body adapting to excruciating pain, all of my limbs accommodating the loss of function in supporting my body by torquing themselves into odd bent sore and inefficient muscle groups begging for help.
Quick side note here, and you will find plenty of posts and poems here on this; my daughter specifically would be the first to admonish that I had years, YEARS dammit, to find a way to get help before she’d eventually peace out and give up completely on me.
While yes, also no. There’s something that happens between your brain and your body when you have a chronic injury or pain. An agreement. The body will do what it can to continue to function, however poorly, and the brain will do its best work to help adapt, survive, keep you choosing to stay, accommodate your limbs and outer life in extraordinarily ineffective ways that feel just so real and right to fool you. Your life becomes small so you can use every ounce of the very little strength you have, to stay in it.
My youngest son was with me for my surgery, it was so kind of him, so good to have him there. He was my ears and eyes and fielded the surgeon’s and his team’s updates and let my other children know what was going on.
This surgery was similar in may ways to the hip, the team, the Dr, the location and the prep. It was very different in that obviously I knew mostly what to expect, which was great. Different in that I left right away this time, where I stayed overnight for the hip out of caution and a little fear of being on my own right away afterward. My youngest son and daughter were with me for that surgery, and while that was wonderful, there was still fear because I am a human person who had a whole joint plus a little more removed and replaced and that is pretty damned freaky and amazing in the same breath.
Here I am ten weeks post and feeling really wonderful. I have a lot of responsibility now to care for these new parts and to continue to get strong after ten years of almost complete inactivity.
Funny story I will tell you some other day about car camping during those years that both felt amazing and horrifying at the same time while I tried to convince myself I could live happily ever after while living with the level of pain I was in.
Ten weeks post. Makes me happy. I’m slowly getting back out in the world in ways that make me appreciate this so much-I am not avoiding people, or places, or parking as close as possible to buildings, or deciding not to go somewhere because my body will not cooperate. I’m starting to sleep longer-jesus christ I forgot what good sleep feels like. Slowly. Because it will take some time to work through a very bad decade.
Ten weeks post knee along with six months post hip. Means my body and my mind are on speaking terms again. Means my mind can now be open to planning a future again instead of deciding on a daily basis what room to post up in for the day or just stay in bed, or just stay.
It’s good to remember what was so I can appreciate and start to take some joy in what is.
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