A Low-High Week of Recovery

I'm glad I decided to give myself at least another week to recuperate from surgery before taking on any more activities in my search for 'youth'. The week has been very up and down.

Monday - When physical therapy came to my home, she marveled at how well I was walking, graduated me from laying down & sitting down exercises to sitting up and standing up exercises. Yea for me! My flexibility measured from 3 degrees to 98 degrees. Almost straight to past a right angle. Another yea!

Tuesday - I felt stiff. The muscles in my 'new' knee just didn't want to bend, and I knew I wasn't walking as well as I had been, but didn't know what I'd done 'wrong'.

Wednesday - PT came and confirmed that my knee was not bending much because it was so swollen from water retention. My flexibility began at 7 degrees--we didn't go any further than that, it was so depressing. After helping me through a workout, she piled pillows and folded blankets on my bed and told me to lay down at least twice a day for an hour with my legs propped up on that stack. A miserable day, but hopefully it would not keep going like that much longer.

Thursday - I knew as soon as I woke up that this was my 'Magic Depression' day. The way I understand it, at some point after surgery, all the left-over operating meds finally drain out of your body, and that change in chemistry makes you severely depressed. This was the day to check in with my General Practitioner, and I groused my way through that office visit. It's a good thing my doc has a sense of humor and great patience with his patients. I apparently had not picked up any nasty germs for him to attend to, so I was sent home. I kept telling my son I just wanted to 'punch out the day and go to bed'. I did spend quite a bit of time in bed - feet properly raised - but I never figured out how to punch the day out.

Friday - much better! Pain was pretty negligible, legs were the proper size. When PT came, my flexibility went from 2 degrees to 104 degrees! Yea for me!. The exercises were tiring, but I managed to up the number of repetitions I did, plus add a new exercise. Yea for me again! I was feeling so good that when the phone rang, and the hand unit wasn't at my desk, I got up and walked to the next room to answer it - without my walker! I managed it, but doing it wore me out so much, I went to bed around 7:30 that night. I didn't feel a bit guilty about it, because I'm still recovering.

I still have about a week before I get my staples removed, and we don't know how much more physical therapy I'll need, but I should be able to drive after that. Yipee! Now I can finally go to the store and get that bag of potatoes we haven't had these past 2 weeks.

Now that I'm through the major part of recovery, what do I tackle this week? Something that won't demand a lot of my time, because I'm still doing PT, still progressing towards full strength. I'm going to concentrate on brushing my teeth, something I usually forget more often than I remember.

What's Next?

Colored my hair. Check.

Got my knee replaced. Check.

What's the next thing for me to do in my Battle Against Age?

It's a long list, with lots of things for me to do, new habits to establish. Which one should I do now?

Actually, this past week has been a bit of a wake-up for me. I've known for a long time that you can't just wave a majic wand and everything is changed, your life is now hunkey-dorey. It takes weeks of actively deciding to do one thing, day after day, before doing that thing becomes a habit. And once you have achieved that habit, you can start to establish the next habit you want.

So I've had a busy week. Surgery on Monday, return home on Thursday, and I'm still on pain meds, still need help from my family for even the littlest things, like putting ice around my leg, helping me get socks on.

In my few moments of being fairly lucid this past week, I pondered what I could tackle next week. The entire household is kind of like standing on its head, and I want to add one more complication to it? Am I TRYING to fail?

No, I'm not. And there's no rule that says I have to tackle something new if I'm not finished with something else. Yes, the surgery is done, but my body is still recuperating. I check in with doctors on the 13th, the 12th and the 15th. In the meantime, I need to concentrate on my physical therapy, my spirits and just getting myself back to healthy. A healthy me will be so much better than the pre-surgery me or the still-recovering me.

That's my chore for the next week, and probably longer than that; to continue to recover. Because there are no magic wands, and some chores cannot be accomplished in a week or less.

Hurry Up!

When I was young, I wanted technology to hurry up so I could partake in new endeavors. Hurry up and send people to the moon, so I have a chance to go! Hurry up and make aircars so I can have one! Hurry up and find other planets, outside our solar system!

I haven’t yet made it to the moon. I don’t have an aircar, or even a hybrid car, and I don’t think anybody is even trying to make a hover car anymore. And they have started finding other planets around other stars, even a couple that might be considered vaguely ‘Earth-like’. But I never became an astronomer or even an astro-physicists, so I’m not involved in any of those discoveries, and probably never will be. Bummer!

Now that I’ve slipped into middle-age (when I was young, someone who was my age would be considered old), I still want technology to hurry up, but I’m looking a lot more at medical technology. Hurry up and find a better way to deal with bad knees. Hurry up and find a way to make me no longer reliant on reading glasses! Hurry up and find a way for me to actually lose weight and not have to live on dry salads and/or exercise 12 hours a day!

Today, I went to a pre-screening to see if I qualified for a new study of a new lasik surgery procedure that would eliminate my need for reading glasses. I did not qualify. I was at the upper end of the age group they were looking at, so possibly if I were 5 years younger, I would have qualified.

Hurry up! I don’t want to be ‘a little too far gone’ every time one of these new procedures comes along!

A Place to Sit

A few years back, a friend went to a specialist. Walking had become so difficult, she couldn’t go a full block without stopping to let her knee pain fade. She was just past 50, and even though the doctor agreed that her arthritis was bad, he felt she was ‘too young’ to have a knee replaced. He gave her a pair of knee braces to help keep the bones in proper alignment and suggest she lose weight. But the braces tended to slide down her legs, which didn’t keep anything in alignment, and without being able to use her knees for exercise, it was pretty impossible to lose weight.

About 5 years later, she returned, braced to receive shots of fake lubricant in her knees, even though that stuff had to be renewed (more shots) every 3 months. NOW he was ready to replace one of her knees, but felt she could ‘put up with’ the other one a while longer. He still wanted her to lose weight.

Today, she is doing better. Only the one knee has been replaced, but the ‘old’ knee only occasionally gives her any pain. She belongs to a gym and works out fairly regularly, but has only gotten up to 1.5 miles on a treadmill. She enjoys theme parks and shopping malls, and used to enjoy a nature walk from time to time, but she really can’t do those any more. Why not? Because a lot of these places don’t have benches in the locations where she needs them.

For instance, at a theme park, you are expected to walk from your car somewhere in a sea of a parking lot to the entry gate, stand in line to get in, and then walk some more before you come to a snack place that might have a bench. And after you’ve spent the day walking and standing in line (with only a minute here or there sitting on a ride), you are expected to walk all the way back out the gate and to your car, if you can remember where you left it.

She had a handicapped sticker for her car for 3 months while she recovered from her surgery, but now she gets to park out with the regular people, beyond the handicapped stalls, the pregnancy stalls, the taxi stalls ... and there won’t be a bench for her to catch her breath when she finally gets to the mall door, either.

I don’t think a day goes by that you don’t hear somebody mention that today’s citizens are aging, that the ‘baby boomers’ are starting to retire. So why can’t anybody install a few benches scattered along the pathway?