Don't stop, thinking about tomorrow...

When I had my first knee surgery in high school, the mid 70s, I ‘d had a piece of cartilage lodged in the joint for a couple of weeks keeping me from expending my leg fully.  Didn’t matter what I did, the leg would not extend fully.  Going in and cutting out the cartilage for the first of many times, was the optimal solution.  But on the morning of my procedure, miraculously, I woke up with the ability to straighten my leg, walk normally, without pain!  I was healed!  Whoop!  Nope, said the doctor, who I am pretty sure would become Michigan’s Dr. Death, named Kevorkian, said that eventually that piece would become lodged in there again and in the process, cause more damage to the joint, which was already lacking an ACL from my previous football injury.  So, procedure #1 of more than a dozen to follow.

But that ‘buyer’s remorse’ still is part of my persona.  Do I really need someone to cut off the tops of two bones, remove my kneecap, and replace them with titanium and plastic?  Do I really want to be patted down every time my new joints set off the alarm at airport security?  After all, left knee only juts out at an angle of about 13 degrees and the right at a mere 5 degrees.  Pain is generally doable with a serious daily anti-inflammatory and a few thousand milligrams of Tylenol.

But the last few months have pretty much overcome my natural feeling of fear of having this done.  I have altered my expectations from skiing in Colorado to just being able to sit down in a movie theater or relax on the couch without constant pain.  Hopefully I can get more than that out of it, but right now I can get no relief from cortisone injections, over the counter pain-killers, and even some stronger stuff left over from previous encounters with surgery.  An added pain bonus: a week prior to surgery, I had to drop my daily anti-inflammatory drug of choice.  Apparently it really works, because in its absence, the joints are screaming.  And when I spoke to the PA who works with my surgeon she told me that, “It really hurts for a couple of weeks.  Like really bad.”  I can’t wait!