...according to one medical professional familiar with what I've been through in the last three months.The short version is thus:
- Total knee replacement
- Go home
- Start falling down
- Fall down hard enough to squish the dressing hard enough to make Hitchcockian spatter
- Get re-admitted
- Surgery to repair the open wound (looked like a watermelon with a big wedge cut out of it - I have pictures!)
- Go to the nursing home I think fondly of as Bedlam
- Develop a UTI and sepsis - hold at a LaGrange point for about 5 days (no memory except 3 little snippets) until getting back to low-Earth orbit, then touching down five days later.
- Lost 25 pounds
- After a month at Bedlam, off to the surgery center to release pressure on my cervical spinal cord.
- Weakness, numbness, and lack of range of motion, endurance, strength, and sense of touch slowly returning with physical and occupational therapy.
- Lots and lots of physical and occupational therapy.
Three surgeries in two months.
Neurosurgeon says 18 months of healing. And I may not get everything back, but we stopped the continuing damage.
It wasa scary to wake up every morning, wondering what I won't be able to do today. Now, it's kinda fun to wake up and find out what I can do today.
Friends remark that I seem to be in good spirits in the middle of all this. I try not to worry about the things I can't do.
I also think about the man I saw in therapy, who was re-learning to correctly say the names of a fork and a spoon.
I got no problems.
