Still… These frigid temps have us wrapped up in their unyielding grasp despite all efforts to maintain our internal temperatures. Long, gray days, with an occasional tease of sunlight that bounces off of the snow’s glaring facade seems like a cruel enticement.
I’ve added yet another challenge this winter to an already trying few months. Recovery from surgery is difficult the older we get, but this time around, with the addition of icy pathways and limited egress to fulfill physical therapy appointments, it almost seemed like a cruel mockery.
The challenge then became… to not only see through to this finish line but to keep going day by day.
First of all, the gratitude I feel for living in this day and age where something as complex as a joint replacement can be resolved with a 45 minute visit to the surgical floor and then home the same day to begin to heal is miraculous in itself. This being my second adventure in this area, I have been asked what led to the need for something like a knee replacement given the type of work that I do in physical fitness. Lyme s disease, in my case, went undetected for 9 mos and severely impacted my overall joint health exasperating an arthritic condition.
Nevertheless, there I was, still in very good physical health in my early 70’s and deciding to fix what was broke was clearly the direction that I chose to take.
So…here I am, alongside you my readers, in the midst of a polar vortex. It’s not that I’m unaware that this is winter and this is just how it is…it’s that when the physical body becomes depleted from days and days of lack of sleep and moderate pain ( to be clear, between #4-6, on the pain scale) our bodies get internally cold and can’t get warm.
I even ordered a mattress heating pad for the bed.
That seemed to work like a charm until it was time to wrap my healing knee in ice packs. The challenges were real.
Speaking of obstacles…it might not have been so bad if I was able to just stay put in my home. But, heading to post op Dr visits and then to physical therapy appointments resulted in navigating thick, slippery ice. You may have noticed.
One of the things my surgeon mentioned was to be sure
“Not to fall..”! So when those days came that required me to leave the safety of my home, the anxiety of landing on my knees became an overriding thought.
Alas, I made it in an upright position for all of my visits, but the winter is not quite over yet, is it?
There is one thing I did want to share about this whole experience that was in part the hardest thing to navigate.
It was that time between sunset and sunrise.
There’s an emotional element that really should be considered one of the most important components in post op care.
I get that the Ortho teams help us with managing pain by using various doses of medication. The Drs job is to do the repairs on a bum knee and do it well.
Re-framing the emotional anxiety and putting a spotlight on the hard work that it takes to trust, believe and focus on finding the way back to movement should be very high on the recovery list. There’s only so much Netflix one can watch to distract the obvious panic when it’s 2 hrs until the next dose of pain medication and no one to share that with.
This topic is definitely worth exploring and I definitely plan on doing that as soon as these meds wear off and I feel a bit clearer.
Thank you for sharing this journey of rambling with me this winter.
I plan on being better than ever very soon.
Pat Larsen is a syndicated columnist in Greene and surrounding counties. Please feel free to contact Pat at 518-275-8686 to chat about your experiences this winter.
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