10 Minutes or 60 Minutes

View to the prairies from South Campus Health Hospital

What I can’t tell since I got my new hip is how long I have been asleep.

Pain meds have given me a lost sense of time. 

Of course, the lost sense of time could also be that I haven’t been wearing a watch.

When I wake up I have no idea of what time it is.

In any event I went to bed last night at 11:30 pm and was up by 1:30 am.

So I stayed awake for an hour organizing my bedroom by putting everything that was had no home, on my bed. Then it was time for me to go to bed but I had no clear place to lie.

I cannot be the only person who has just shoved all of the pieces of clothing on my bed over and up a bit higher and then climbed into bed. If it is good to do once, it is good to do many days in a row, though I don’t think Mary will let me operate that way.

I had a wonderful time in the hospital – everything so new: the building, the equipment, the procedure, the view. I asked one of the nurses if they find that older people have a loss of memory during hip surgery. “That won’t happen in your case,” she said.

“How do you know?”, I asked.

“Because you are using your phone to take pictures and anyone who can do that at your age probably isn’t going to have that much memory loss.”

That really made me laugh. If I were to choose 3 highlights of my hip surgery, one would be watching the needle go into my hip to that it could be frozen for the hip block. That procedure took two doctors and a nurse and I got to watch that happen on a lovely black and white screen. I guess the next step will be doing having the show in Technicolour.

The second good part about the hip surgery was physio getting me right onto my legs and showing me the set of exercises for the next 6 weeks. As I grow older my respect deepens for two professions: pharmacists and physiotherapists. When I am told I am part of a health team, I really believe it.

The third thing I want to recognize is that there is a binder for everything – a binder and tabs. And a class that goes with the binder. I know our health care system is in danger of folding but in these three instances I hope there is no decrease of services.

And oh yes, a fourth componentthat makes good surgery: Mary coming to help for 10 days. I need every moment of her time. Mary goes to bed exhausted. I have the best of care, and the bonus of having Rhiannon here as well. She does homework or colours or goes to Frozen2 with her Mom.