When I came to after my first knee replacement, time stopped. It settled into a slow burn that covered the whole of my right leg. The pain was so all-encompassing that, with my leg wrapped to the thigh in ace bandages to control the swelling, I couldn’t pinpoint where the incision down to the bones had been made. The week of days in the hospital dragged. A smudge, not a blur. Walks down the hall were miles, and the wait for the EMTs to get me into my house was a month.
When I came to after my second knee replacement, time hit a warp. The pain upon waking was centered and sharp. “You were cut here,” it yelled, a shriek from the right side of my left kneecap, stretching an inch above and an inch below.
I walked when I was supposed to, reconnected with the nurses and medical techs who remembered me from the week in January when their work was my whole world. I ate the same oatmeal and yogurt parfaits and green and purple seedless grapes that filled little plastic cups, the stems removed and the flavor the same at every meal. And then I got the hell out of there three weeks ago today.
And since then, I have sat.
I realized this week that I haven’t been listening to music while I recover because I don’t want a time of pain, boredom, fear, and anxiety to mar songs I love, or songs I might love if they’re not tied with these three months of surgeries and recoveries. Books are difficult to read. I was re-reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake when I entered the hospital the first time, and I still haven’t finished it. The setting in West Hollywood made me so homesick for a place that isn’t even my home that I still can’t bear to finish it. Not until I know when I might next be in L.A.
I got halfway through Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties between surgeries, but haven’t picked it up since the second one. The Percocet fog makes it difficult to follow a time a lived.
I can read cooking magazines, and. I can find sloppy errors in the pieces. The article in Cook’s Country about farro overuses the word “here” at the end of sentences, and the essay in Food and Wine about a Chinese family learning to cook with American ingredients in 1970s Wisconsin was over-edited and lacked flow.
This doesn’t mean I can sit down and write anything of my own, or that I have any idea what I’m going to do when I return to work part-time in two weeks. If anything this recovery time has made me question my writing. I haven’t been able to do it, haven’t heard from the agent who has my manuscript, and I don’t know how to make time to write what I want balance with the time it takes to write what pays the bills. Besides, when I’m staring at the same walls I have realizations that my dream job no longer exists. I grew up wanting to be an newspaper or magazine editorial columnist: an Erma Bombeck, P.J. O’Rourke, Dave Barry type. It’s a job that vanished with the internet.
Maybe I’m doing it right now as I write on Substack, mostly in oblivion, without a paycheck.
I’ll be six months from my 50th birthday on April 22nd. Less than two weeks. Had my insurance not gone squirrely, April 22nd would have been six weeks post-op. But because that caused a delay, I won’t hit that milestone until April 27th, a date that means nothing to me. April 22nd meant everything, because of the correlation with my birthday and because it’s the first night of a three-night run of Wilco shows in Chicago. It was going be my debut. The coming out of my new joints, the beginning of the next chapter, the abandonment of this white-knuckled era of pain.
But now I don’t know.
I told my physical therapist yesterday that I can’t fathom being able to navigate this celebratory trip. Not with the level of pain I feel every day, and the emptiness I feel behind my sternum when I think about recovery coming to an end. How I’m bored and lonely and might literally die if I watch another Seinfeld or The Office rerun, but I’ll almost certainly die if I try to put on real clothes after taking a shower, then leaving my house. The sidewalks are buckled, pimpled with gravel and sweet gum balls waiting to trip me. People have put me out of their minds—as they should—their own lives have kept moving while I chose to pause mine in January.
My physical therapist gave me some supplemental work I can do to increase my chances of feeling like I can reenter the world on April 22nd. I’m hesitant, though. I’ve become comfortable on this couch, with this cat and Easter candy and the remote controls.
Woody snuggles on my chest several times a day and purrs in his sleep. He lulls me to sleep. Why would I want to do anything but this, forever? Some days it’s hard to find an answer to that question. I’m loathe to make him move.
I had some of this during the first surgery, but not to this degree. The seven weeks between surgeries lasted a year, though, giving me so much more time to recover, entertain visitors, put on a dress and get coffee with friends even though my steps were shaking and slow. The three weeks since the last surgery have lasted a day, and I’m tired.
Memory, Percocet, and surgery brain are all playing tricks on me while they dick around with the hands on the clocks. My sense of time hasn’t existed for nearly three months, and my best understanding of that won’t come until I’m past this intense recovery phase. I had two major surgeries in a seven-week period. Friends keep reminding me how remarkable this is, and that I’m not supposed to feel normal yet. I haven’t read what I wrote in the midst of my first recovery, but I bet it sounds a lot like what I’m writing today.
I do remember that I wrote this in February:
April 22nd. That’s the date I’ll get my post-op clearance from my second surgery. It also happens to be six months to the day from my 50th birthday, and the first night of a series of Wilco shows in Chicago celebrating the 20th anniversary of Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I lucked into tickets for all three nights, where I’ll dance with my new knees to “War on War,” the song that pulled me out of a suicidal close call when CJ was an infant.
You have to learn how to die If you wanna wanna be aliveA panic attack feels like ensuing death. Birth feels like death. The nerve endings sparking electricity in my knee right now feel like death. All of these things are lessons in what death feels like. I continue to learn how to manage all these little deaths so you can find me dancing where live music plays for a long time.
I think I need a little more time in this death cocoon. At least this week. Maybe the next. It’s a cocoon where I’m pumping my ankles, pressing my quadriceps, massaging shea butter into the raised zipper of my one exposed scar while the other scar finishes closing under a line of steristrips. Thirty-two staples in each knee, perfectly executed by one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country. Soon enough they’ll be covered with tattoos of bouquets with flowing ribbons, as all folly turns to beauty. After I learn this current lesson in how to die to be alive.
I agree with Donna. We do not know each other and have not been paid to say this.
You write beautifully. There’s a lot to recommend in your writing. I understand you are writing through pain and fog and such, but it’s better writing than you are giving yourself credit for.
So there.
I love your writing. So vivid it almost makes my knees ache.