Friday, January 24, 2020

Operation Left Hip

The case manager told me that my operation would be at 3:45 pm and that I should arrive at the hospital at 12:45 pm. All of that sounds easy. Many tests preceded this day. When the day had magically arrived, every step was activated with ease.

I had a choice. I could have a general anaesthetic or a frozen hip.

 I choose the latter. “Do you think Dr. Mackenzie does all of his own home repairs?” I asked after hearing a lot of grinding and chopping.

“I don’t know,” said the anaesthetist. “We could ask him,” he went on. "Helen is standing right over there. She works in the operating room as
 Dr. Frank Schnell and Dr. Willie Cabanatan are my hospitalist doctors.
They told me that the femur had fractured again,
just like last time, and thus the wire wrap to keep it together.
I am to do only general weight bearing on my legs for 6 weeks.

“He seems to be pretty good at it,” I said. “Still, no need to ask,” I said. “He probably does his work in the hospital and lets the home repair people do theirs at home.”

I elected to have just the frozen hip, not the general anesthetic. A person probably only gets two chances to do this in a lifetime.

The next day Dr. Frank Schnell and and Dr. Willie Cabanatan came to visit me. “You are still Dr. Schnell’s patient but we will be giving you after operation, they went on. As soon as your team tells you you are on your way, that is as long as we want you to stay. There are studies staying that the faster people get using their leg’s they bette they feel.

There is a lot of information that comes with hip surgery; first there is a 2 ½ hour teaching class. Then in the hospital everyone reinforces information that has been given over the days. I noticed that I paid a lot of attention to the facts that seemed immediately relevant and to those that seemed to be coming up soon.

My room mate fell to the floor as she was trying to make it to the bathroom the night after I had my surgery. Mary was there beside her, asking her if she needed help and she was saying no. That is another tricky point – when to accept help. There are many ms-steps along the way and after I saw her fall, I noticed that I began to take special care with my own two-wheeled walker. The physio-therapists had just been telling her that her best friend is her walker.

In my case, this is true as well. I am thrilled to be home, and even happier to have Rhiannon and Mary with me here this evening as well. They stepped out to see the earlier show, Frozen 2.

There is a mantra for walking with the walker: the good, the bad, the ugly. The good is take a step with the old hip, since it worked and has already been artificiailized. The bad is the old hip that required surgery. The ugly is the crutches or 2-wheeled walker. But the mantra doesn’t work for me. I consider the good hip, my new one, having waited so long for it. So I must say the surgical, the bad, the ugly, though none of the whole process is ugly. Quite the miracle from my point of view.

Arta

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