Healing October

 It started years ago, but the real healing started October 1, this year, when I awoke from anesthesia to behold my dearest love and my new knee, the latter wrapped up in a stretchy bandage with a doctor sitting past it explaining how my unconsciousness and reawakening played out. 

My right knee had become untenable, rendering the rest of me impossible to get in and out of a fishing johnboat,  and on the run-up to the replacement unable to drive safely, the leg strategized as it was with its foot heel placed below and in between the gas pedal and brake pedal. 

Cut to now, sneaking ineluctably toward the date marking week four of recouperation. I have a Game Ready ice water circulator pad strapped around the knee and thigh who need help relieving swelling so that I can find that magical place where the knee stretches and (most specifically) bends to achieve normal movement. It's a peach, requiring only the trading out of five 8 oz. frozen water bottles every 5 or 6 hours to deliver soothing circulating near-frozen water through the pad to address that bogeyman, inflammation. Thanks to my friend Chad for the loan. And thanks to my friend and extended family member, Steve, for the loan of the walker and to Phil for the hand-tooled cane. Thanks to Rocky, for making time for me in the middle of an horrendous ongoing experience with another of his close friends. Thanks to Julie, my PT Home Care person, and to Luci, for adding another regimen, the MELT system, to my toolbox. Also, thanks to my dearest, Lee Ann, for patience and care and impetus to heal. Moo, thanks to you. Finally, thanks to my closest companion these days, Lemon. Here she is right this very moment, helping me type.

She's been here every step of the way. I had a bigger barrier of pillows and such up in the early days of healing because she would have leaned directly on the wound. In bed upstairs, I sleep on the right side so she can't, so she often makes herself comfortable resting her head on my other thigh, falling me to sleep with my left hand comforted in the softness of her incredible fur. 

I have home Physical Therapy for these first few weeks, and Julie, my therapist, is wonderful. I like to say she's a twin sister from another mother:  She paints, and I love her painting, and she has a small business out of her home baking sourdough bread, which I plan to purchase once she "graduates" me as a client. We have very similar tastes in music. I'm listening to 89.5 Roots Radio WPLN public radio station as I finish up this post, and she loves that kind of music, as well as classic rock and roll and art music, like Alan Parsons Project. 

So here we are. It still hurts, though I have long since abandoned the ingestion of the Oxycodone prescribed for the worst of it. The big issue now is the swelling, I'm told that some people have problems stretching the knee open and some have them bending. I fall into the latter category, and at the apex of the bend, which may be around 60 or so percent with a goal of at least 90, it hurts like nobody's business. I'm working on it. 

Here's a little poem I typed into my phone at 5 a.m. this morning, when I awoke, hit the bathroom for a pee, and came back to bed with my mind working to dredge up words (song? poem?) I dreamed:

I’d believe in God if I felt him here with me.

May be his book’s just a conspiracy.

Your love is always always dear to me,

but I can always find a little fear for free.

I will say so the minute I am done:

Everything’s alright go on ahead my son.

And you my daughter you’re the heart of me,

though it was completely right to set you free.

Now I’m wandering around without my heart,

laughing at myself as I fall apart.

I think it's a song. There you go, I'm keeping my once a month blogpost streak. Where's my soshmedia  prize?