Post Surgery 15 weeks: Refueling

Wednesday, September 4

The other day, I got in my car to drive myself to a haircut, and the low fuel alarm dinged.  So in addition to going to the bank, and getting to the salon on time, I made a stop at a gas station.  There’s an app on my iPhone that I use to track my mileage and fuel usage, and when I added this purchase, I noticed that the last time I bought gas was in early May.  Sadly, this isn’t an indication of my great gas mileage (Ed’s Prius gets the credit for that in our family). Rather, it tells the tale of the fact that I’m just recently starting to take responsibility for my own transportation again, after all these months, leaving behind that post-surgery helpless state.

There is a kind of perverse pleasure in giving yourself to the helplessness of a post-surgery state.  You get wheeled into an operating room, and within moments, you’re off into la-la land.  When you wake up again, you’re in a recovery suite, and there’s somebody there to give you their full attention.  Ice chips?  Sure, here you go.  You graduate to apple juice, and then to some crackers, all the while the fogginess starts to lift.

You matriculate from there to a hospital room, or maybe immediately to home.  There’s somebody to take care of you, to issue edicts about all the things you shouldn’t do, and to make sure that you concentrate on the one thing that you can do:  heal.  Healing can be a full time job;  the thing is, it kind of goes on on its own merry way, and your job is to just lay around and allow it to happen.

Now, none of this acknowledges pain you might experience, or the indignities of not being able to get to the bathroom by yourself, or the fact that you feel nauseous and are lucky if you have an appetite at all.  Those memories fade.  It’s a wonderful survival mechanism of the human race that we can remember that we were in pain, and that something hurt, and even that something hurt like hell, but we actually don’t relive that pain when we think about it.  Even now, just going on 15 weeks after surgery, I can remember that, as the nerve block and the anesthesia wore off, my knee started to hurt, and to hurt like, well, like nothing you ever want to experience.  And I can remember that I couldn’t get comfortable, and as a result of the pain and discomfort, I couldn’t sleep.  But, thankfully, thinking of that experience doesn’t bring the pain or discomfort back.

But that pleasure, the perverse pleasure of the disability?  Oh, how lovely.  How lovely  to have somebody bring you food, and water, and ice, and to track your meds.  Nothing to be done but lay there and let the magic of healing take place.  Everyone and everything is designed to take care of your needs.  

In my TKR recovery, Ed set up the living room so that everything I needed was within my reach.  He cooked for me - but that’s nothing new, he always does that.  But now, over the course of the summer, he forbade me from doing the dishes, or even helping to put things away.  He took over my chores, the most heinous being cat box duty every morning.  He drove me to every PT appointment, and every surgical checkup, and he went to the pharmacy to pick up my new or refilled meds.  We were lucky that he had a slow summer with work;  taking care of me was his full time job, and I’m blessed that he took on the role of caregiver so joyfully.

So I gave myself into it.  I let Ed take on pretty much all of our home chores.  I thought about watering the plants, but that was as far as I got - at least until they started wilting and dropping leaves.  I wore the same clothes day after day, and when I finally did some laundry, I let the dry clothes sit in the dryer for hours, or, sometimes, days before I rescued them.  The stuff I absolutely needed to iron just stayed in the laundry basket.  The other stuff, I wore all wrinkled.  The line from “must be ironed” to “this is good enough” got very blurred.  It’s a good thing that I love showers, or else it could have been dire.  As it was, I was clean, but makeup?  Nah.  Hair styling?  Sure seemed like letting my hair dry on its own was the best, most environmentally sound solution - as well as the one requiring the least energy on my part.

But eventually, all good things come to an end.  You get antsy, and it’s time to start picking up the pieces and parts of life that you’ve abandoned.  And caregivers need to get back to their own lives.  One night, Ed let me wash a couple of dishes.  A week or two later, I figured out that I can sit on a little step stool and clean the litter boxes.  Another night Ed headed out to a work thing, and I learned the drill of refilling the ice machine.  And so it goes.  One day, Ed wasn’t available to take me to PT, so I drove myself - only in his car, because it doesn’t have a clutch.  Then several weeks later, Ed had an errand at the same time I had a PT appointment, so I ventured into my own car, and voila - there’s yet one more dependency gone.

My recovery has, essentially, eaten up the entire summer.  Surgery was the Thursday before Memorial Day, and here we are on the back side of Labor Day.   We spent some time out shopping for a new couch on Saturday - a chore we started in the spring, before surgery, and then put on the back burner.  It was a lot of walking, in addition to the walking we did to go to breakfast, and to coffee;  and all this walking on some of the hottest days of the summer.  I managed to finish a load or two of laundry, including the dreaded ironing of the stuff that got too wrinkled to wear.  And it all wore me out much more than I expected.

So I took some time this weekend, giving myself permission to continue to refuel.  We turned on the AC and hunkered down Sunday afternoon and watched a couple of movies.  The plants need to be watered (again), and the bird feeders need to be filled (again).  But the flock of Bushtits that just flitted through our yard seemed to find enough to feed them, so I figure, all things in good time.  Ed’s making dinner while I sit on the deck and contemplate the other stuff that needs to be one:  packing for a trip back East next weekend; cleaning the tufts of cat hair that seem to multiply on their own accord - but only on the dark wood floor;  cleaning Doug’s ice machine so we can return it to him before we travel.  For another moment or two, I’ll sit here with the breeze finally cooling things off, and let myself refuel a bit more before I take another step towards moving out of the post-surgery mode.