Brighter days ahead for me – foto by Smith

Healing body stealing hibernating sleep.

Sit in chair.
Drop off to sleep.
Snap awake.
Look around.
Where’s Lady?
Oh yes, she’s in bed for the night.
Drop to sleep.
Snap head up.
Where’s Lady?
Oh yes. . .

Repeat endlessly

Take two illusions and call me in the morning.

I’ll be typing a letter and whamsnap wake with sore awkward neck, look around confused, look down to see laptop monitor filled with endless pages of 333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 or ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;.

My body’s stealing every second of reality it can to heal itself.

It was magic at first. Doctors told me if I were seriously motivated, I could get out of the hospital in 3 days — all I had to do was stand up on my own the day of the operation, walk a few dozen steps my second day, and navigate stairs on my third.

After my 90 minute operation, I stood on my own and took a couple steps. On second day I walked around the floor and up and down steps and they sent me home where I slowly climbed three flights of steps and began exercises.

Within 2 days I’m effortlessly doing whatever they throw at me, including walking with two crutches, one crutch, no crutches, a cane.

Four days after my body was first chopped and channeled, we went out to a party.

Each day was leaps and bounds better than expected, much less than feared.

Then today body says WHOA, easy magic effortless healing time over — from now on you must pay one heal at a time like mere mortals; every time I slow or sit, I fall asleep, awake with molasses brain on cricked neck.

Pain, sleep, molasses, confusion. My leg’s swollen thigh to foot like two sausages stuffed into a single casing not quite big enough for one. When the doctor took off my bandage he said “it’s going to look like you were hit with a truck, and we were the truck.” Bright purples mottled with ugly yellows greens and browns round and round from top on down. My genitalia appear to be imperfectly preserved grotesque purple-black Barney the Dinosaur fossils.

And yet, I’m amazed. Nine days after cutting, I can walk on my own, feel less pain than I did before the operation because this is mere flesh pain, not my previous 6 year bone grinding against bone pain. These doctors are wizards dealing in real magic.

This time next week I’ll get the 27 steel staples removed. They warned me not to remove them myself, as if I’d go down to Office Max and get a giant steel staple remover or something — although they might have a point since I have taken my own stitches out in my youth.

But whatever the minor cost of current curse, I’m happy because I’m maybe two months away from having a life again — and this time it will be a life better used because as Ral Donner sang in 1961, “You don’t know what you got until you lose it.”

I had, I lost, I’m regaining, and I’m bloody well going to work it well for the betterness called Lady and her scamp.

Blue ball, anyone?

Better days coming – foto by Smith

hip replacement – foto by Lady K

A few non-random thoughts on getting repeatedly whacked by very large meat tenderizing hammers wielded by angry strong Viking cooking gods.

(The sensitive may want to avoid the fotos at the end of the blog — I know my wife felt sickly after seeing — I wasn’t sure she was going to make it through changing my bandages.)

The ebb and flow and ebb and flow and ebb and ebb and ebb and flow battered me a bit down here in life’s troughs and valleys as I continually try to pull it together with laughter and thanks and smiles yet constantly lose it over and over on the downhill track of pain, exhaustion and lack of rest stops on this week’s cheap ride on the dead celebrity drug express.

Before my hip replacement operation Wednesday, the anesthesiologist suggested we use a spinal block rather than anesthesia because it was safer for me and meant less blood loss. This brought a shuddering “no way” because that’s how they’d handled me down in Mexico during my 2008 hernia operation from hell where I was mentally awake and aware during the cutting, but dead meat from diaphragm down. I could hear the heart monitor beeping erratically, sometimes way too fast, othertimes too too slow, oftentimes missing beats, and all the time the docs and nurses talking and laughing away in Spanish and me wondering how long this hell could possibly continue without breaking my mind. Couple times the monitor contacts would slip off my sweaty chest and the beeps would go silent yet they’d keep laughing talking cutting away while I panicked. Also feeling people cut and tug away at your groin flesh is not the way you’d want to spend a couple hours.

Explained this to the anesthesiologist and he said no problem, we’ll spinal block and give you Propofol so you’ll be in a sleep state and won’t remember anything. “The drug they killed Michael Jackson with?” “Yup, but we’re better at it.” So I said okay.

Operation was to be one to three hours — took 70 minutes, after which they left me laying on the table for hours while looking for a bed. They gave me a button to push which released opiates into my vein and I found it actually worked only once every 6 minutes no matter how many times I pushed (and I pushed and pushed and pushed) and it took almost an hour to get enough in me to start dulling some serious pain.

They took me to the Cardiac floor because there was weird stuff going on with my heart, like maybe my lower ventricle electrical impulses are overriding the top ventricle’s beat commands. There the nurse asked if I wanted Percocet or Dilaudid for pain relief. I jumped at the Dilaudid and when she shot it into my vein the world changed, I smiled and told her, “Now I know why this was Elvis Presley’s favorite drug.” We’re talking big-smile pain-free happy-land here.

After much blood sucking for tests to see what wasn’t wrong with my heart, they finally decided to move me to the hip floor but I was attached to all kinds of heart monitor cables and this large black nurse is thrusting her hands down inside the neck of my t-shirt patting my flesh trying to find cables and tubes to unhook when I looked up at her and quietly said, “Excuse me, but do we really know each other well enough for you to be feeling me up like this?” which sent her into 10 minutes of raucous laughter. I think the laughter is where it started to go wrong because they forgot to give me my next pain-killing dose of Dilaudid.

Getting to the right floor around 11pm Thursday I mentioned I was in pain but it was too close to midnight changes and they forgot so I went almost 10 hours with no pain relief at all and hurt so much I became scared something had gone seriously wrong. Totally frightened the operation had failed and in MASSIVE pain, it was a bad night for the mind, bad night for the body. But they finally gave me some Percocet’s (which is the drug that hooked Jerry Lewis) and I returned to a manageable reality.

In the morning the physical therapy people walked me around the floor on crutches, then up and down stairs and just 24 hours after the operation said I was ready to go home — the docs had told me earlier it’d be three days if I were motivated and more like a week if I weren’t. Staff said I was the fastest recovery they’d seen. But someone forgot to tell the doctor who’d decided I’d be leaving the next day so I sat for 11 hours getting my double dose of Percocets every 4 hours until I finally had enough and went and told them it was time to let me go. They looked into it, said I was right, wrote me prescriptions for more Percosets and released me — but with no info on my condition, no bandages, no instructions I had to change the dressings once a day, no nothing,

Got home to a bad Friday night, bleeding in the bed, and Saturday my leg and foot began to swell with edema, which when we researched it meant anything from not elevating your leg enough after an operation to maybe having a heart attack — so once more much mental fear descends due to the unknown knowns.

Fortunately an hour later a visiting nurse stopped by, said I was fine, and had me elevate the leg — which alleviated but has not ended the problem.

Today while my wife is off running a 10K charity run, I start my first of 14 days of home physical therapy guided by a visiting nurse. In two weeks I’ll be out and about, seeing the doctor again and going to poetry readings. Figure I’ll clomp up to the open mic on my aluminum crutches, mention the hip replacement and get free charity applause after I read.

In four weeks I can have sex; in eight I can drive; in twelve I can take a bath.

Looks like my life’s on the way up again after 6 years of downhill slide.

hip replacement – fotos by Lady K