A week in rewind

I woke up in my own bed for the first time yesterday morning since Monday. I realized with a slight start, sleeping beside me, was my wife-she wasn't actually sleeping she was watching me as I had been sleeping. I didn't ask her how long she's been doing that because I'm afraid of what the answer would sound like: 'all of our married lives.'

Things happen to me. I don't ask for it, unless you consider being born 'asking for it'. And then we'd have to define the gerund and parse the object and we'd be back in the tall grass, where I spend so much of my time.

Having coffee yesterday morning I explained to my wife that this time I had no memory of ever leaving prep for surgery. One minute I was stripping and donning a special operating room garment with holes where they blow warm air in because the hospital is cold to minimize the spread of germs (as I understand it). I've tried all week but cannot find a tactile memory of that sensation, and yet it must have happened. In the past I've been able to recall the transfer from one gurney to another in the operating room, sometimes indistinctly remembering the music and seeing everything at least for awhile through a gelatinous, strawberry haze.

None of that Monday. I awoke, thinking I had gargled sand, in a corner of a room on the fourth floor of Backus Hospital in Norwich, though I only knew any of that from previous experiences as I wouldn't get beyond the room door until some point on Tuesday. I remember not eating very much of anything for at least two days, but then I have trouble eating fremde food and avoid doing so whenever I can.

There's a lot more about what went on this week I wish I remembered. I recall something in my sleep so frightening me on Wednesday evening (probably really Thursday morning) that I shouted aloud and woke up and scared the bejabbers out of my roommate who had his hip replaced on Monday morning. He thought that was the hardest thing in his week until he drew me as a roomie. Sorry, Steve, and hope your rehab goes better than your initial post-op did.

The Visiting Nurse made her first visit yesterday afternoon and I learned that years of 'making do' with a 'bum knee' came with a high cost. I have a terrible set of habits right now on how I walk that I will need to completely break and relearn. At six weeks shy of 57 years of age, something about an old dog and new tricks keeps playing through my head. I just checked my driver's license and it appears ready to expire before I do which is how I always like that to be.

I'll see the Visiting Nurse three times a week and work on the exercises she's laid out for me by myself everyday of the week, on multiple occasions, and perhaps by the time I return to see my surgeon in the middle of April I'll be ready to be an outpatient for rehab. At some point after that, it'll be permission to return to work and reinsertion into the hive.

I'm seeing the whole screen much better right now, mainly I suspect because of the pain killers I took earlier, but I'm still only catching a few frames and the audio sync isn't always there. I'm hopeful the frame buffer will start to salvage the missing bits, but I'm also a little afraid of what I'll see when I look at it. I know the one thing I can't do is look away-those days are over.
-bill kenny