My Past Week

Yesterday was a week a since my hip replacement surgery. It's been a week of confusion and pain as I struggled with issues of pain management in the hospital as my body chewed up pain meds and spit them out, leaving ME to deal with the remaining agony using my own resources. The confusion was the result of my body's response to anesthesia. It's a fog of forgetfulness that takes away my name; my recognition of my family; how to read a calendar or to recall the year; odd, completely random things come out of my mouth which I gather in the early days, went un edited and unchallenged by common sense and in the later days of this mind morass, these statements left me in cold fear because although I did not know with what to replace them, they JUST WEREN'T RIGHT SOMEHOW...and I knew that.

I recall hearing a nurse's voice giving a report to a doctor about me, kindly euphimizing and saying, 'She's still quite forgetful' in an effort to distinguish my mad verbiage from sense. I couldn't see her, but am quite sure the universal circle turning pointer finger to the temple accompanied this remark to let him know that his patient was as crazy as a loon. But at the time, non of this held much significance to me. I didn't know, nor did I care, that I couldn't even tell them my name. I just WAS--a puddle of ME in a swamp of pain.

Once I started showing slow signs of sanity, they shipped me off to a sub-acute rehab with which I was familiar because my mom had been "rehabilitated" from a hip replacement there as well. It is a luxurious hotel-like building with large private rooms reminiscent of the Hilton, even down tot the wide flat screen TV attached to the wall. And this is a step down in price range because here, I only receive two or three hours of therapy daily as opposed to the 6-8 I would have gotten in the rather dingy and depressing hospital unit which my insurance company forbade to me due to it's superior expense. Go figure. The change was absolutely perfect for me, because in my weak and very pained state; six hours of therapy would have been completely impossible.

So here I am in cheap , inferior luxury. Soaking up the waiter table service, and the niceties of newness in my sub-acute rehab center.

Pain is a complete steamroller. I can't bear to rise from my wheelchair except to lurch for short distances leaning heavily on my walker. Slowly insanity dissipates back to its normal levels...It does reappear in statements which are just "wrong." But from which people kindly look the other way and tell me sincerely, that I'm sounding MUCH better.

And that's where I am now.