When you spend over a year depending on crutches or a walking stick to support you, rehabilitation isn't easy. Every time I arrive home from physical therapy shaking and exhausted, needing ice to soothe my knee and coffee for my nerves, I wonder if I can do this.
Every block in the neighborhood or sometimes every sidewalk square walked is either a challenge or a victory.
The physical therapist assures me that I'm doing better than I think, but I only see what I lost 452 days ago. If I push for that extra sidewalk square before turning around, its only a 3 foot square. Its not the mile. If I push to conquer walking a block, its only a block not a 5k. If I push to walk across the room, or building, its not enough -- its not grocery shopping, or being able to walk across the parking lot, into the church and through the sanctuary. If I push to balance for 15 seconds, its still not cooking, or to stand waiting.
I'm left wondering, how long will my life be on hold because of this?
There are too many sides to the question. As working poor, I wouldn't be in this position if we had insurance coverage when I got hurt. I wouldn't have given up so much life to this injury simply if I had been able to treat it when it happened. We wouldn't be facing an increasing debt load that we won't be able to handle.
The burden this has placed on my children has taken its toll and it will continue to.
The burden on my husband is huge. Without him, everything would have collapsed a long time ago. He does all of those tasks I can't. Forty is so young to become a caretaker for your spouse. It was the time we planned to enjoy our lives together, instead of him looking after me knowing that simple things aren't simple because I'm physically broken.
So day 452 finds me struggling to rebuild and rehabilitate something that has gotten so weak and worn that I my only hope is in getting strong enough to replace what is broken.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Monday, September 12, 2016
Post surgery update
I'm tired. Its been over two weeks since surgery, and I can safely say I'm exhausted. The first week post-op was spent in a medicated haze, unable to focus on the words that I wasn't able to type. I returned to work the second week.
I didn't want to process what my husband said about his conversation with the surgeon on the day of surgery. I had hoped he had misheard and was wrong. I had hoped so much that he was wrong. Otherwise, how do you continue with bad news? How do you continue to suffer in pain that ranges not in numbers but in stress? How do you enumerate "anxious" and "frantic" pain levels? How do you wake up every single morning knowing that you will never be free of the pain?
The post-op appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. My husband went with me and held my hand through the pull and sting of having sutures removed. Its nice to have a hand to hold through those small pains, as silly as it sounds. I'd prefer to be a wimp and not have to tough everything out all of the time.
I like the surgeon. He worked on my knee before in an attempt to alleviate the problems that arise from patellar-femoral syndrome. I felt that surgery was successful and that I was happily able to maintain a life that I could enjoy. He wasn't as jovial as usual this appointment. He flipped quickly through the glossy images of the interior of my knee, his face becoming more grim.
The surgeon told me he didn't think he had helped me. Arthritis looks like fur in the photos, and the interior of my knee showed much of it, except in the areas where the cartilage was completely gone and where the bones were worn down. In those areas, there was nothing he could do. The furry areas, he smoothed down as much as possible to ease the joint's movement until that cartilage wears away too.
He won't do a knee replacement at this point. I promise him that genetically I'm predisposed to die before I'm 60 anyway, so why not be able to enjoy these twenty years now? He writes the orders for physical therapy, explaining that I need to strengthen the muscles as much as possible before he can even consider a partial replacement. He says we'll do injections to manage the pain. Maybe we can get a little more time out of the knee and I can get stronger. Otherwise a replacement won't even work.
This knee won't return to pre-injury strength, and I won't return to my pre-injury lifestyle. Those dreams of wandering through ancient European castles or taking the kids to the hidden lakes my father took me to are nothing more than that--dreams. The best we can hope for now is to stave off the crippling effects of this injury as long as possible.
My husband asked the question at the end of the appointment: Would the outcome have been different if she had gotten her knee looked at when she hurt it last year?
The surgeon's face dropped, "Yes."
I didn't want to process what my husband said about his conversation with the surgeon on the day of surgery. I had hoped he had misheard and was wrong. I had hoped so much that he was wrong. Otherwise, how do you continue with bad news? How do you continue to suffer in pain that ranges not in numbers but in stress? How do you enumerate "anxious" and "frantic" pain levels? How do you wake up every single morning knowing that you will never be free of the pain?
The post-op appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. My husband went with me and held my hand through the pull and sting of having sutures removed. Its nice to have a hand to hold through those small pains, as silly as it sounds. I'd prefer to be a wimp and not have to tough everything out all of the time.
I like the surgeon. He worked on my knee before in an attempt to alleviate the problems that arise from patellar-femoral syndrome. I felt that surgery was successful and that I was happily able to maintain a life that I could enjoy. He wasn't as jovial as usual this appointment. He flipped quickly through the glossy images of the interior of my knee, his face becoming more grim.
The surgeon told me he didn't think he had helped me. Arthritis looks like fur in the photos, and the interior of my knee showed much of it, except in the areas where the cartilage was completely gone and where the bones were worn down. In those areas, there was nothing he could do. The furry areas, he smoothed down as much as possible to ease the joint's movement until that cartilage wears away too.
He won't do a knee replacement at this point. I promise him that genetically I'm predisposed to die before I'm 60 anyway, so why not be able to enjoy these twenty years now? He writes the orders for physical therapy, explaining that I need to strengthen the muscles as much as possible before he can even consider a partial replacement. He says we'll do injections to manage the pain. Maybe we can get a little more time out of the knee and I can get stronger. Otherwise a replacement won't even work.
This knee won't return to pre-injury strength, and I won't return to my pre-injury lifestyle. Those dreams of wandering through ancient European castles or taking the kids to the hidden lakes my father took me to are nothing more than that--dreams. The best we can hope for now is to stave off the crippling effects of this injury as long as possible.
My husband asked the question at the end of the appointment: Would the outcome have been different if she had gotten her knee looked at when she hurt it last year?
The surgeon's face dropped, "Yes."
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