Hale and Hearty

… or something very like that.

Once again with the blog-neglect over here at if you want kin …  Sigh.  Yes, I had a lot of work to do recovering from knee surgery, but really, I could have been blogging during all that time. Alas.

Today isn’t my first day back online.  Yesterday I (finally) put up the second episode of my Adventures in Racism comic.

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So what have I been up to?  Well, the healing and rehab, of course.  My in-home physical therapy was great.  six days a week with my amazing, brutal task master of a therapist, a wonderful South African woman who I would happily work with every day for the next year if that could be arranged.  She was tough on me, but I think that’s precisely why my recovery is as far along as it is.  I’m in outpatient PT now, with a different therapist.  I like him a lot, but he’s not nearly as hard on me as she was!  I still have my super-serious cane, but only use it when I’m on the street just to be careful.  At home, in the office, wherever else I am, I’m totally cane free.

There’s a lot to get used to with a new knee.  I had been what I now think of as “invisibly disabled” for a really long time.  What I mean by that is I’d been living with a significant amount of pain for a really long time, altering my way of being physical in the world to accommodate the limited- and non-workingness of my knees.  The fact that I carried a cane around was an indication that something was wrong, but I certainly didn’t move like someone who was in pain.  And that was good … but now it’s a problem.  I learned so many ways to move that are different from the fully-able ways to move, that I’m now having to relearn the right way to do things.  It’s a little frustrating, but it’s interesting, too.  When I’m trying really hard to do something in PT, and I can’t figure out why it’s not working, my therapist will demonstrate the movement and then show me what he sees me doing, and I’ll see that it’s one of my compensation moves that I need to unlearn.  It’s weird just how much they don’t help me now that I have a knee that functions properly.  I still have one knee that doesn’t function properly, so it will be interesting to see how balancing the two of them works.

I’ve also been reading online about my new knee joint.  And the more I learn, the more I am angry that my insurance was reluctant to approve my surgery before now.  Their excuse reason for denying me in the past was that I was too young and would need to have the surgery again in another 15 years.  Never mind that I think that’s a stupid reason to make me live in pain years longer than I needed to.  It’s also not true.  The joint I have is some new-fangled, fancy-pants technology that is estimated to last at least 30 years!  Now, it’s true that this wasn’t an option when I first started thinking about knee replacement, but it’s been on the market long enough that I could easily have had this operation two or three years ago.  Maybe more.  Feh.

But I have a hard time being angry right now because I feel so well, that’s really all I’m focused on.  I have to remember not to overdo it (and keep remembering and keep remembering …), but I’m happy to be on this learning curve.

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It’s Tuesday, so it’s a Slice of Life day!  Stacey and Ruth are on vacation for the month, but plenty of other slicers are posting.  Check out the day’s tales!

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My “becoming bionic” tag is silly, of course.  What I actually am becoming is Borg.  Of course.