Counting Down to Getting My Life Back

In less than a week, I'll have a brand new hip on my left side. Everyone tells me I'll get my life back after the surgery for my total hip replacement and a few weeks of physical therapy and recovery, and I'm absolutely counting on that! The past few monhs -- all 52 weeks of the whole last year, really -- have been progressively worse and worse, more and more painful, and I've been increasingly losing "me" in the process. That's probably not true, but it feels that way. So I'll be glad to get my life back and me back too.

I'm anticipating that the one thing I'll dislike afterward is the inconvenience and aggravation of having the bells and whistles go off every time I go through the security line in an airport as it picks up on my new metal hip. I'll be wanded every time I go through an airport -- and that better be the extent of it! -- until they come up with something more progressive than those big old lumbering walk-through sensor arches they have now. But being able to walk and not limp or hurt will definitely be worth it.

I resent arthritis. How dare it do this to me?! Everyone calls it a degenerative disease that there's no cure for and no way of reversing. Gee, how optimistic. Probably if I ate pure something-juice and raw something-berries from now on, I could stave it off, but the idea of giving up Flo's Filets at Longhorn, Stouffer's Turkey Tetrazzini, Baskin-Robbins Pralines & Cream and Campbell's tomato soup (cream of - I like it with milk) with oyster crackers just is too much for me to seriously consider. Maybe "they" will learn more about arthritis and figure out how to treat it or get rid of it, and I sure wish they'd hurry.

Meanwhile, I have a blue disabled tag to hang on my car's rear view mirror so I can park in the handicapped spaces. I'm grateful for that, as it makes the excrutiating walk shorter. With all of us baby boomers getting older and more of us limping along, I think they're going to need a lot more of those designated spaces in the next few years. It's already hard to find a free one at the movie theater, Costco (and they have a lot of them!), and most restaurants.

There's a lot to do before this kind of "procedure." I have had my pre-op tests; signed my medical power of attorney and living will documents; bought all kinds of aids for not being able to bend more than 90 degrees for four weeks (yes, that'll be a trick); bought the ugliest mammoth hard plastic seat you've ever seen to raise the height of the toilet 5 inches (not putting it on til 5 minutes before I leave for the hospital and taking it off the moment I can); been to the dentist (because for the next two years, minimum, I'll have to take an antibiotic when I go, even for just a cleaning, to ensure no infection); talked to nurses and reps from my surgeon's office, the hospital and my insurance company (they called me, I didn't call them); and done 100 other things on my to-do-before-surgery list.

After I get my new hip, I will be glad to not have to always seek out the handicapped stall in the ladies' room. Getting up off of one of those little low commodes about a foot off the ground with nothing to grab onto and a bad hip can be an incredible challenge. I've come up on occasion with some creative ways of dealing with that (which I won't go into here, even though I know you'd laugh). Let's just say that this may be the #1 thing I'm looking forward to when out in public after I get my new hip.

I'll also be glad to be able to get into and out of a chair, into and out of bed, and walk more than a few feet at a time free of the pain that has literally crippled me and given me a perpetual grimace, especially the last couple or three months. I'll be glad to sleep more than an hour or two without the pain waking me up. I'll be glad when I can put weight on my left leg again without feeling that acute stab of pain and fearing the hip would crumple and send me sprawling on the ground.

Pain is exhausting and depressing. Both have been a surprise to me. I thought pain just hurt. No, it drains you, or at least it does me. It sucks out my energy to do the simplest things, so that I'm tired when I get up in the morning, I'm exhausted by mid-afternoon, and I'm completely useless by early evening. Worse, much worse, has been the not giving a damn about anything but making it through the day. Accomplishing anything has been too much to hope for, I'd say, five days a week. I usually had a couple of good days -- no, less bad days -- each week, but I never knew when they would be. Then I'd beat myself up for not accomplishing anything, letting other people down, being a failure and a bad person. This has all been so *not me* and I have not dealt with it well. So the idea of being six days away from help and a few weeks away from being me again is wildly thrilling.

I will say that I've become quite adept at coming up with workarounds to some of the challenges. I've got a "sock donner" to help me get a sock onto my foot and pull it up enough to where I can reach it to get it up the rest of the way. I have learned to squirt body wash on the floor of the shower and rub my left foot around in it since I can't reach it to wash it. Next I'm going to tape my shaver to a long wooden spoon to shave my lower left leg where I can't reach. And probably the nicest thing I've done to deal with this is...get a pedicure. I'd never had one before about six weeks ago, but when I couldn't endure the pain anymore of reaching down far enough to clip my toenails on my left foot, I had to do something. It's pure bliss to have someone pamper your feet for an hour. I'm getting another pedicure two days before I go in for my surgery. I plan to enjoy it -- I don't know if I will be able to justify it anymore after I get my reach back.

One bright spot in all of this has been Twitter. The "tweeple" there have been wonderfully supportive and informative. One hip and knee surgeon, Dr. Todd Swanson (@tvswanny) out of Las Vegas, Nevada, twittered me with this link to his Web site, which has a cornucopia of information about joint replacements. Thank you, Dr. Swanson!