I Am A Neurological Mess...

...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.