They wheeled me into the extremely bright and white operating room early in the morning.
“Where’s the robot?” I asked.
“That’s the first thing everyone asks,” a nurse said with a laugh. “It’s not here yet.” (The anesthesiologist gave me the choice of a spinal shot or general, I said just do what you did last time.)
The surgeon came by my recovery room in the late afternoon, we looked at the pelvic X-ray of the two artificial hips, and he said he had repeated the procedure two or three times with the robot to get it within two millimeters, the idea being to get both legs equal length. He said that sometimes they can’t be exactly equal when chances of dislocation are factored in, one of the big hazards during the rehab process. (Those shiny new joints look like pretty cool additions.)
Day Two
I’m sitting in my hospital chair with a cuppa coffee at 7:45am with my breakfast in front of me, the CNA just got me out of bed where I’ve been since the hip replacement operation yesterday morning, and the physical therapist will come in an hour to help me get dressed. (Last night I watched two to three hours of convention speeches, often whooping loudly, then managed to get five hours of sleep with my leg squeezers humming, beeping, and flashing all night.)
Another big concern is blood clots, and that’s why I’ve had these leg wigglers attached below my knee to help prevent them from developing. (A blood clot in the leg can travel up and block an artery in a lung, causing a pulmonary embolism, which can usually be successfully treated with blood thinners.)
Two of my nurses are from Covelo, one a sharp handsome fellow who said his family has a 5000 acre ranch up there. I said I’d been feeling no pain, he said that was because I’d been getting strong liquid Tylenol into my arm nonstop since the surgery twenty hours before, and gave me a #5 oxycodone, the lowest dose. I asked how many would kill me, he said twenty, but was probably just trying to scare me straight. (His Covelo cousin is another of my friendly nurses, her twin sister also works on the floor, and several others told me they live in Brook Trails.)
There are many young Mexican men and women working as nurses and CNAs, one gorgeous one visited me in the middle of the night, a statuesque beauty with luxuriant hair. She spoke with a deep sultry accent as she handed me the pee bottle to take into the bathroom with my walker.
(I wanted to find out more about the nurse’s Covelo ranch, with that much land there must be meadows, creeks, and maybe a river, right? He said they have cows which go everywhere, even into the steep forest. He saw me scribbling, I talked about my writing, and he said he won an award in Hawaii for an essay about his culture: half white, half Yuki.)
Breakfast is done, it’s time to start the celebration of the new hip, and I just ordered carrot cake and ice cream for dessert. (Oh yeah, here we go!)
Day Three
This morning feels so weird, I have to try to get someone to help me with every little thing here. I need something to spit into after brushing my teeth, a shower might be nice, help to go pee, get up, get dressed, and put on my leg squeezers. It’s the busy time in the morning, they must be short-staffed, and so I wait. (They say this is elective surgery, and yes there is someone moaning loudly every morning down the hall, with major intestinal pain I was told, so I get no priority as my hip is not a life-threatening condition. I just heard an urgent alarm sounded to bring emergency help to a room)
You’re not allowed to leave your bed without an attendant there with you as you move along with a walker. If you do anyway they are alerted by a loud bed alarm, and then they come running. (Mmm, the coffee just arrived, that should even things out.)
Damn, I forgot what a project and commitment it is to get a total hip replacement: I won’t be able to drive for two months and won’t be able to sit at my computer desk unless I get a leg rest. All this so I won’t have to limp around all the time, and be able to walk in the park again. (Forget the shower and teeth: I got help getting dressed and into my chair, and am awaiting breakfast and the physical therapist.)
I watched Kamala give her speech last night, think she really nailed it, but what a crock, she probably won’t be able to do all those things she proposed or promised, it’s just a show.
One thing for sure, no matter who wins, half the country will be severely disappointed: all I care about is beating Trump and all the Trumpers care about is beating the San Francisco communist Kamala Harris. But then her husband Doug Emhoff knocked at my door holding his clipboard, asked if there was anything I needed, and I thought, “Jeez maybe she will pull this off.”)
(What brought me to this place? I may be paying the price for trashing my hips while hiking up and down the steep mountains out in the Gulch for a few decades. Should I have been more sensible about where I chose to grow those remote pot patches?)
Home: Last night the pain hit and I felt this seemingly endless and boring discomfort. I took an oxycodone, and within half an hour I felt the sweet release of a hopeless drug addict.
WOW ! she promised to fix a bunch of stuff “On my first day in office”. WHAT? Stuff she and Joe broke in the past 3.5 years! She is there now , fix it NOW, Joe is on vacation on the BEACH! WHAT has she ACCOMPLISHED during her past 3,5 years? Just askin …!!!
We don’t care,
Just Beat Trump
and that will be the
Only Accomplishment Necessary
(Thanks for reading and for your comment…)
Sauna Time
I told a friend about my calendar and he said it was odd and might be counterproductive that I keep daily records of all my habits and hobbies, including sleep, smoking weed, walks in the park, and taking saunas.
“Don’t judge me man!” I said. No, I didn’t say that, he might be right, and also the people who say, “Don’t judge me, woman!” are usually the ones who should be judged, right?
Yes I keep records (then total them every week, month, and year) but there is a reason for this: I want to keep track of certain behaviors so I’ll know when an interval has elapsed and it’s time to do it again, like cleaning the sheets every two weeks, right? Here is an example of what I’m talking about:
In my never-ending conflict with insomnia I decided to crunch the numbers to see if my early evening saunas, when I drank a lot of water, were affecting my sleep. I made a graph listing the dates of the fifteen saunas I’d taken over the last two months, overlaid it with my sleep numbers and my weed-smoking stats, and I found I had insomnia about a fourth of the days I took a sauna, but never on the evenings when I also smoked weed.
Since I was taking about two saunas a week and smoking about twice a week I decided to adjust my schedule and have sauna night also be my weed-smoking night. This worked for a week or so but when I started taking saunas more often I didn’t want to smoke more often, so what to do? Since the insomnia link to saunas was having to get up in the night, after drinking all that water, I decided to take saunas earlier in the day, like around noon. (With this new routine, insomnia is happening only once a month, proving there is some use to my record-keeping, right?)
***Too Much Time In The Day: I’ve heard people say there’s not enough hours in the day, to do what they want to do, but I think there’s too many and I wouldn’t mind lopping off the last three. (Way back in the day my neighbors always said they were busy but I rarely was, then when I saw some of their beautiful gardens and orchards I thought, “Ohhh, so that’s what they were up to.” I might have been one of the first fake homesteaders around here, with my one dead apple tree and an overgrown fig.)
I usually have a pretty good morning, drinking coffee, writing, feeding the birds, walking in the park, taking a sauna, eating lunch, and then watching an hour of sports talk, but the day slows down later in the afternoon, and after dinner come those three hours I could do without.
For the last few years I’ve been spending them rotating from TV to internet to reading a book or newspaper, but when I recently adopted a list of new rules to deal with insomnia, the last was to stop screen time three hours before sleep. So how would I kill those three hours? I started listening to books on CD and here is my new routine: Read for half an hour starting at 7:30pm, listen to a book on CD at 8:00 (Bill Bryson books the last three months), back to the book at 8:30, more book on CD at 9:00, retire to bed with a book at 9:30, and read till lights out with eyes closed at 10:15. It seems to be working, just started Moby Dick on CD, and it’s fantastic!
Podcasts are my go to sleep medicine. A few of my all time favorites are “Literature and History” by Doug Metzger, “Hardcore History” by Dan Carlin, and of course “History of Rome” by Mike Duncan. I spend way too much time during the day working on my various programming projects, so resting my eyes under a sand-filled eye weight while listening to one of the above chills me out nicely for a good night’s sleep.
I haven’t gotten into Podcasts yet but wow my sister, who’s helping me through this hip replacement recovery, has her smartphone on all the time, all the time, even as she walks around the voices come out of her pocket…To each her own, and yes, I like to be entertained all the time as well, but wow…Lots of entertainment out there these days, far cry from the Globe Theatre and minstrel shows, but even then we had to have it…
Bob Abeles: Yes, I, too, used to listen to podcasts as a sleep aid…and, yes, Dan Carlin is amazing. However, I felt bad about not remembering more than the first five minutes of any podcast because I zonked out within minutes. “Why waste such excellent talks on my sleep?” I concluded, so switched to listening to Youtube horror tales, as they also put me right into slumberville without making me feel like I wasted quality narrations, which I now listen to during my waking hours. But since there are also so many excellent narrators and authors in the horror genre, my guilt is once again haunting me. What to do? What to do? It’s keeping me up nights!
Horror tales before sleep?
Wow…
There’s a specific genre for that: “scary tales to help you sleep.” Just search for that phrase on Youtube. So I’m not alone, thousands, maybe millions, beat back their insomnia in that way. Certain subsets of that which I most enjoy are “let’s not meet,” “middle of nowhere,” “I’m being stalked,” “dates gone wrong,” “forest ranger tales,” “crazy relatives” and “sleep paralysis.” Others prefer haunted house and ghost stories, monster legends and cryptid tales, but I prefer more of the true-story types.
But there are also oodles of great narrations NOT based on horror, to aid one’s sleep. Just search for “stories to help you sleep.” Best of both worlds then. A delightful narrator called “Hellfreezer” will entertain you to sleep with the foibles of the workplace, roommates, obnoxious neighbors, gamers, hotel workers, tech employees, food servers, etc. ..all based on real experiences by those who send him their tales.