Hip-pity Hopping Along

It has been a busy week and it looks like things won't let up until I get my anesthesia and go to some needed sleep for my hip replacement surgery on the 25th of this month. After glancing at the folders, brochures, forms, booklets and answering many phone calls from hospital, insurance company, doctor's office and the like...which came my way since my first orthopedic appointment on May 1st, I made the comment to my husband, "Everyone is making such a big deal about this!" He answered shortly, "It IS a big deal!"

As I work my way through pre-op appointments, informational classes, and rearranging furniture and switching bedrooms so that I will not have to navigate stairs, I am beginning to agree with that assessment. Plus, this weekend my daughter will make her first visit home since leaving so abruptly over a month ago. So there will be shopping, dinner out, the baking of a birthday cake, and making her favorite meals when she is home...Not bad busy; good busy...

I am beginning to feel the pressure and the urgency of remaining "well" for this surgery...No bronchitis; no asthma exacerbation; no psychotic episodes...you get the picture. I really would be upset if, after making all this preparation, I would have to postpone this surgery. Not to mention that the chances of getting a space between asthma hospitalizations this long again, are slim....My asthma has been under good control for the past month or two. That is some kind of a record, I think. Now for just a few more weeks of that...

I don't have any deep thoughts to share tonight...Mostly I'm just tired. I've only been getting a couple of broken hours of sleep each night for weeks (months??) due to pain in my back and hips...I've had to totally give up sleeping in my hospital bed because the last two times I began the night there, I had excruciating pain which my pain meds could not even touch. So now I am recliner bound...but lately, I've been so busy, I can only wish for a few of those long days of sitting here...chatting with David. David is gone. For now, so are those days of rest. And when I get home from surgery, I may find it a challenge to get in and out of the recliner without breaking my "hip precautions" which are like the Ten Commandments of Hip Replacements. Fortunately, there are only three of them....but I will be confronting at least one of them in practically everything I do, which means I need to be alert (hah) and to find new ways of doing everything that habit has long dictated.

That's enough from me for tonight. God bless.