Yeowww! ~~~

                       

Yessirree, that is what it was like at my first physical therapy session today, but I’m the one on the table.  I’m definitely sore after the workout but I really, really liked the physical therapist --- he listened!  And he also said I should have been in PT beginning the 4th day after the surgery and shook his head at the time passed.  He brought me up to speed on the “real” story of this type of knee surgery.  He said the surgeon, albeit a good one, was dead wrong on telling patients they’d be good as new only a few days after the surgery.  The therapist said even the jocks were a good 2 months to healing, and my age group was certainly longer.  He heard the snap/crack in my shin and he understood when I told him about the tight wire-like feeling running down my leg that actually vibrates, and he was very familiar with my almost asleep feeling in my foot but when it touches the ground, my foot vibrates and moves right up my leg.  He said my range of motion in one particular direction was ahead of the game, but he could see that the swelling was still markedly noticeable and that showed inflammation and pain still going on.  He doesn’t think that the surgeon did anything wrong but does think that it was wrong not to send me to PT within days of the surgery and it takes longer now to get where I need to be.  That’s it in a nutshell although we talked and did measurements and exercises for another hour and made appointments for 2 days a week for a month and then see where it all stands and reschedule accordingly.  He told me to use the cane and to do the exercises he gave me 3 times a day (and a load of reps).  He believes he’s going to be able to rid me of this pain and get the healing going the way it should be.  I like him and I trust him and have a good feeling about him, so I can bear this beginning PT pain ---- sure, I might yell, but it’s for a good cause.  I’m up for it.  So here we go again,  taking care of this and icing and exercising, etc,, and being away from my pc for the most part, but I am determined to get better.  Lord knows when I’ll blog walk but will when it’s feasible and I get used to this new schedule.  Age, who needs it?  Ick.  Well, I guess it is better than the alternative, and besides, my furry ones, Sam and Lucy need me.

See you all when I can.  Enjoy this glorious weather get out and do things.  Pot some flowers.  Sit outside with a good book….add a glass of wine to that.  Wave to your neighbors, and light up the world with your beautiful smiles!

                                             Xoxoxo

PS/  Happy May 1st!   MAY POP!  (You have to really be old to know that one)

Here’s how it started:

                

By the time I was in elementary school, the tradition changed from pigs’ bladders to hitting your friends over the heads with school books and yelling, MAY POP!.  Wow.  Could that have been just a Southern thing?  And all this time they thought the problem was in-breeding, opps.

I Don’t Know What He’s Thinking ~~~

No matter what I do when I follow every rule to the letter, I still end up in an empty corner shaking my head in wonder.  Maybe it’s the “invisible” thing.

I went to the knee surgeon last Thursday, limping and with my cane, and first his assistant, Shea, comes in and he’s all aglow with, “Ohhhh, so good to see you!” Then he asks how I am and my answer was, “I honestly am not sure.  I am still in pain and still limping, and my knee is much warmer to the touch than my other knee, AND the pain is all the way up my leg just shy of the groin area”.  He says, “Have you ever had any problems with blood clots?”  I answered no, and that was the end of that discussion.  Then he says for me to walk for him without the cane.  I hobbled and dragged my achin’ leg and he said, “Ohhh, I see you have quite a limp there”.  I said yes, and the pain is still there, in my knee as you can see the swelling, down to my ankle, the back of my calf, the back on my knee and up through the thigh like I told you a minute ago. To even try to press on those areas almost takes me through the roof.”  He tells me to sit down and then starts pressing hard around my knee and calf. I was not quiet and he says, “That hurts?” What is the matter with these doctors?  Then he got up and said, “Great to see you, and Dr G will be coming in.  You might want to think about having a cortisone shot….”, and I said, “WAIT, you’ve already given me a number of them the last few months and nothing helped.  You can’t keep doing that.”  He thinks a minute (they never read your chart) and then says maybe physical therapy will help and to talk to Dr G. 

Dr G comes in, “Great to see you!”  I am so sick of that phrase by now, just fix me, but I nod and say nice to see you, too, BUT, I am still in pain, still swollen, still limping, and the pain is not only in my knee but……blah blah blah.  I pin him down to the question of, “Could this still be the Levaquin that is causing it?”  He returns to square one like he’s never heard that I had that problem, yet the MRI showed it plain as day.  All he says is, “Hmmm, maybe we should think about a cortisone shot and then if that doesn’t work, maybe physical therapy”.  Don’t you know I wanted to shoot through the ceiling.  I said the same thing again to him about already having an allotment of cortisone and he glances at my chart --- just a glance --- and says let’s try physical therapy.  I asked again about the pain throughout my leg and his answer now just dropped everything to physical therapy, and he said, “Tell the physical therapist where it hurts”.  THEN, he hesitates and says, “Did we xray your hip? Maybe it’s your hip!”  I said, “Hell NO, it is NOT my hip! It is my leg as I keep telling you and telling you.” Guess what he said. “Well, the next time you come in, if the pain hasn’t stopped, we’ll get an xray of your hip.” The insanity never stops. It is not my hip and I will not do the xray. I really wanted to say to him, “Is that buck you’re trying to pass heavy?”  But….you don’t get on the bad side of your surgeon.  Then he stood up and said, “Great to see you;  I’ll see you again in 3 weeks”,  and he left.  Me?  I was now sitting in an empty exam room.

I got myself up, hobbled out and across the hall to the physical therapist business. The girl there was really nice and when she heard I’d been some weeks out of surgery but only now being referred, she was a bit on the surprised side to say the least.  She set up the “soonest” appointment she could which is this coming Thursday.  It’s given me just enough time to debate if I want to even do it.  I can’t take even more pain and I’m positive that Levaquin is playing the part of the pain in the rest of leg, up and down.  I think the knee pain is only the healing taking longer and that would be due to my age.  My surgeon is a sports doc and he deals with all these super young jocks who heal in 48 hours from everything.  He forgets he’s looking at me…..I’m invisible, remember…..and only once has alluded to the fact that “as we get older, we take longer to heal”.  There are moments I think he’s trying to kill me.

And so today, I am icing my knee and leg like crazy, taking Aleve and doubling the dose, watching the rain which I’m sure makes bones and muscles hurt more, hearing the weather report of severe storms beginning tomorrow and through Wednesday night with even the likelihood of tornados, and weighing my feelings about Thursday.  I’ve decided that by early Wednesday morning I will either keep the appointment or cancel it for now.  Yes, my surgeon is passing the buck, and for some reason I feel antlers growing out of my head. As I pass by the  mirror, I see that I am that buck and I’m sort of sick of being passed around.  I didn’t even realize that bucks could be invisible like we seniors are.  Maybe when I see him next I can give him a little bit of hoof in his shin as I smile ever so brightly and say, “Great to see you!”

For now, resting, icing, trying to get in a better frame of mind, and will blog walk when I can sit without throbbing. Pfft.  I didn’t sign up for all this mess.

                                      

The day after my appointment, Mary had gallbladder surgery, so I was at the hospital with her all day and then picked her up the following day and took her home.  She’s doing well, thank goodness, but now we look like Dumb and Dumber walking down a hall.  She holds her side and I limp.  What a pair.

Just a Knee-Jerk (OUCH) Reaction ~~

I haven’t been around for the last days, almost a week now, because I am having problems with this darn knee surgery.  Ever since he dug and dug and dug at part of my knee to get one side of the stitches out, it has remained very swollen and hurts like the devil.  I was doing so well until he got hold of me and now seem to be going backwards.  It’s very hard to even hobble and takes forever to make it down the steps in the morning.  There are way too many times I actually yell and almost buckle over.  I have an appointment with him this Friday, so we’ll see what he says.  That darn clicking-snappin’ sound still vibrates right down to my ankle and that is just not normal.  I tell ya, had I known all of this, I think I may not have agreed to the surgery.  We’ll see;  I just want it to get out of pain.  In the meantime, I’m back to NOT sitting at the pc again……hate this….and haven’t done a blog walk at all.  I WILL catch up and leave a book’s worth of comments to you when I can.  I think that’s pretty much a given, don’t you?

Xoxoxo

                                                    

                                           Help, I’ve fallen and can’t get up

Let’s Go Back…Wayyyy Back ~~~

Ahhhh, Spring.  It is just beginning here with little blooms here and there and as I looked out into the back yard from the kitchen window, I heard those long ago sounds from the back left corner of the yard.  We were building a tree house. My friend, Jon, from 2 doors down, his little brother, Gary, whom we bribed with promises of sleeping in it, my best friend, Cookie, and of course myself, decided to make this our Summer project. We planned and we planned and we had it so mapped out that you would have been able to have the whole neighborhood in it.  Then we stood back and realized we only had 3 trees to work with.  Plan B:  ok, it would be sort of a very rough triangular shape, but still big, and oh boyyyyy, we’d have the best tree house ever built!  Plan C:  Gosh, we need lumber and hammers and nails.  Not a problem, we’ll just ride down the road on our bikes and check out that new house being built;  bet they have some extra they aren’t using. And so they did (well, we thought so anyway) and we saw it piled up, so we took what we needed and dragged it all back to my yard.  Bang, bam, bang, bang, ouch, and a few more and look at that!  There’s shape taking place!  Hmmm, not enough lumber; we will absolutely need a good floor and walls.  Back to the house under construction and lo and behold there was even more lumber to be had. Jackpot!  We’d taken all 4 bikes this time, so we could round up a lot more of what we needed.  Back to my yard and all the hammering again.  Oh my! It was becoming really, REALLY good, but wait, we have to have a window or 2, don’t we?  By this time we’d made a rut in the road to the house down the street, but wouldn’t you know it?  There were 2 window frames just propped up and doing nothing on the side of the house and even glassed in!  Back to my yard with the goodies.  Now we hammered the windows in and they worked!  But, you know, you can’t have a roof if it is going to leak on you when you’re sleeping, so back to the house down the street.  Jon knew exactly what to look for and we loaded up the tar paper and all the shingles we could carry and once again built the heck out of our tree house.

We stood back, we smiled, we broke into big grins and then into all out gleeful laughter.  We did it!  A huge tree house with 2 windows that worked and a non-leaking roof.  We were set!  Oh the Summer was going to be the best EVER!

We took turns going up and down the ladder and carrying sleeping bags into “our” tree house.  Then we planned the night.  We made sandwiches galore and took them with us when it was time for dinner…in “our” tree house.  Darkness came, we told stories, we gloated over our triumph of the Summer and even started thinking about making an honest to goodness club.  Our cheeks were frozen in grins.  We drifted off to sleep and woke to the sound of birds chirping, the sun in it’s morning splendor and ………what’s that?  What’s that sound we asked!  Jon stuck his head out of our back window and I saw his mouth fall open.  The woods behind me were being mowed down to construct a NEW house!  Oh no, our privacy will be gone.  If only.

The new house was built, a family with 2 daughters moved in, and immediately claimed the tree house as theirs.  They said it was on THEIR property!  We were all so upset that an actual fight broke out.  No broken bones but a lot of hurt pride.

A surveyor came out.  It was their property.  The parents, theirs and mine, decided the only thing to do was to tear the tree house down.  Ohhhh, the inhumanity of it all!  We kids stood there while it was torn down and actually cried. We were all of 13 years old and it was embarrassing, but the whole thing was devastating after all that work and then only having 1 night of heaven. Then I looked at Jon and saw a glint in his eye and he was looking all around my yard. He sidled over to me and whispered, “You know what? They still haven’t finished that house down the street and I’ll bet we could do it all again. Want to?”

Well, we didn’t build another one and instead, Cookie and I started sleeping on my back porch, you know, roughing it.  It was fine the first week, and Jon would come over and visit and we’d crack caps with rocks on the bricks and set off sparklers and play Go Fish and War, but he was just biding his time. I should have known.  He waited and waited for us to finally go to sleep and then WHAMMMM, threw an entire bucket of ice cold water on us!  His day was going to come, believe you me, it was coming.  That story is saved for another day ~~

_____________________________________________________________

Here is a photo of my beloved dog, Winnie, the homemade ladder going up to the tree house, and the house that was built behind me that was the bane of my existence.  Both of those daughters came to no good and no one was surprised.

                                                  Sic’em, Winnie!

                             

                                                         XOXOXO