Sitrep

In the days before my hip replacement surgery I felt my mother’s presence near me all the time. At night, I dreamed of her, and in the days, she was always somewhere in my thoughts. I knew it wasn’t that she had come for me, rather, she was there to reassure that all would be well, I would not die from this routine operation I had spent fourteen years fearing and delaying, because my cousin died from it in 2011, and my own hip gave out, bone crashing against bone, on the very day of his funeral. 

I was due at the hospital at 5:30 am, my surgery scheduled for 8 am, my surgeon’s first of the day. The streets were icy, some roads impassable, the snowbanks mountainous from the winter storm the day before, which had dumped a foot of snow on the city. My son slept over, as he would be driving his dad and me to the hospital at 4:30 am. The night before our daughter called to say she would travel from Brooklyn to get to our apartment at 4 am to be with me before I left home. I knew she was worrying about not seeing me before I went under. “I’m not going to die,” I promised her, not liking the idea of her traveling an hour alone with a strange Uber driver in the wee hours along icy roadways. “I’m coming,” she insisted. “I need to hug my mama.” She ended up going to the hospital with us, so they were all there as I underwent surgery, and they stayed all day, my whole family, husband and kids, abiding with me.

It went well. I am healing. My son moved in the first week to help out, along with his dad, who had taken the week off from work to tend to me. My stoic men anticipated my every need. My daughter and her husband moved in the second week, when my husband returned to work, and again, I could not have been better cared for. Honestly, the part of all this that moves me to tears every time I think of it is how completely my children stepped up for me. How present they were. How loved they made me feel. Love in action. They showed me just what that means. 

I’m three weeks into recovery now and already the gains are exponential. The full body pain I lived with for more than a decade is gone. I am walking strongly on both legs, my left leg holds me, despite my two imperfect knees, which I am learning to work with. It’s amazing how much the effort to compensate for the broken hip—because I understand now that I was walking around with a broken joint and that’s not a euphemism—threw my entire skeletal and muscular structure out of whack and how quickly those flares of pain receded once alignment was restored. I still need to rebuild muscles, strength, heal tendons, and observe no bending precautions for another few weeks, as well as continue to faithfully do my PT, learn to listen to my body when it gets fatigued because I’ve done too much (because, typical of me, with the assigned exercises, I tend toward “anything worth doing is worth overdoing”), and generally be patient with myself as full and total recovery takes up to a full year. 

Plot twist, my operated-on left leg is now the longer one. This is fairly common with this operation and it may “settle” as the muscles and tendons stretched and manipulated in the procedure tighten/strengthen over time. And if it doesn't, oh well, I'll still sway to one side when I walk but I will no longer be in pain. I have already regained a much greater range of motion, and can ambulate for increasing distances with little effort, which was impossible before. I still get tired. I’m also sleeping horribly because I’m confined to lying only on my back and I’m not naturally a back sleeper. I have to ice and elevate the swollen surgical leg several times a day, and make sure I walk every hour. I have to ice the right knee too, as it’s doing the work of the shorter leg now, and has its own issues. The physical therapist gives me quad sets to do to support the knees, as I also rehab the hip and leg that I avoided putting any weight on for fourteen years. I’m trying to be the proverbial good student, to nail this recovery journey. All is generally going well. 

I’m also back to work, because I was getting really bored, too distracted to read deeply, and watching too much TV. I can’t sit at a desk or table though, as I’m inclined to lean forward, past the verboten ninety degree angle to peer at my laptop screen, which prior to six weeks, could cause the healing hip joint to dislocate. So I sit in the recliner in the back bedroom, laptop propped on my bent right leg, and make do. I’m grateful to have work to do, the perfect project really for this extended period of physical restoration. I’m editing a wonderful and often heartbreaking coming of age memoir by an actor who’s finally getting his due. A lovely man. 

In some ways, I feel like my life is entering a brand new stage but I don’t yet know what shape it will take. In the meantime, imagine me reclined in that chair in my daughter’s former bedroom, elevating my healing leg between regularly scheduled walks, doing editing work that feels meaningful, and conjuring possibilities for a future in which mobility is no longer an obstacle.