Post-op

Do you know how hard it is to blog while lying on your bed with your leg elevated while balancing a huge bag of ice on your knee as your toddler bounces up and down next to you?

And then the toddler continues to bounce up and down on the bed after you’ve asked her not to and falls off, screams at the injustice that is gravity and wants you to pull her back up. Yet you can’t really move due to the elevated knee and the balancing ice pack but reach over anyway and, in a scene reminiscent of the opening of Cliffhanger, try to pull her back up as she screams hysterically.

Welcome to the next two weeks of my life. At least.

I finally had the knee surgery yesterday. The good news is my knee was not as bad as the doctor originally thought and I’ll probably only be off from work for two weeks. I’ll have to use crutches for about four weeks, but that’s not as bad what I had originally feared; eight weeks of no weight at all on the bad leg. That was the worst case scenario that is no more.

There’s not much to tell about the surgery itself seeing as I was out of it for the whole thing. Speaking of which, there are a surprising array of anesthesia options nowadays, one of which was a lovely shot that numbed my leg from my thigh to my knee so that I needed no pain medication during my overnight stay. Of course that is wearing off now and I am very much looking forward to the narcotics Nathan just brought home from the pharmacy.

Oh, and I totally got sick yesterday morning. I had eaten a lot on Sunday because I couldn’t eat anything after midnight because of the surgery. I thought maybe the chocolate shake I sent Nathan out to get for me had put me over the top because I spent the entire night waking up and trying not to puke. At about 6:00 I woke up and could fight it no more. I don’t know if it was nerves or if I caught the stomach bug Autumn came down with Friday morning, but I was sacked out in a miserable, shivering heap until I had to get up and go to the hospital.

I debated on whether or not to tell the doctor about the tossing of my cookies, fearing he might postpone the surgery if I had the flu. All sorts of scenarios played through my head, the most vivid of which being folks discussing how my death could have been avoided if I had only told the doctor that I had been sick. So I told him. He looked a little concerned and asked if I had told the anesthesiologist, which I hadn’t, but he went ahead with the surgery after I made sure I told everyone I had thrown up that morning.

So now I’m feeling very much like I did four months ago when I originally hurt my knee. After I’m all healed and off crutches I should finally be able to take the stairs like a normal person instead of pulling up the rear behind my two year-old daughter.