Day Five

Day one you're powering through on adrenaline and heavy drugs. There's still a lot of swelling and numbness that is keeping your body from feeling what you would actually be feeling after having tissue pulled from one of your muscles and stray fibers shaved from one of your ligaments and scopes and knives poking and prodding your knee. The narcotics are powerful. Things seem like they will be ok. 

It was a whole new ballgame on Day Two.  We had a nice morning when Greg came over for brunch, but after that, the swelling and numbness started to abate, the nerves started firing, and the pain flooded in. Like, the walls of a dam breaking - that kind of flooding. Notwithstanding that I was maintaining my scheduled regimen of drugs, on Sunday night it was so overwhelming that I lay on the couch crying and trying to breathe. It was like someone slowly was dragging knives into the inside of my leg between my knee and my groin - honestly the worst pain I've ever experienced in my entire life, including childbirth. My poor mother sat with me and stroked my hand and tried to talk me through it. I took some more Oxy and eventually was able to relax enough to get upstairs into bed.

pretty flowers from my coworkers

Monday was an improvement over Sunday, but anything would have been. I napped and watched Derry Girls. I had a phone consult with the PT, who assured me that what I experienced was relatively normal. I hadn't expected that kind of pain, and my big fear was that I had re-injured something, so talking to her was a big relief. She gave me some exercises to do, and I did them. The pain was easing up, so I decided to start weaning off the narcotics because they were starting to make me feel sick. 

swelling is going down

Yesterday was when days of constantly pumping my body with nasty chemicals caught up with me. I felt nauseated and groggy and couldn't eat anything. I didn't do much but lie around and resist my mother's efforts to feed me. I did, however, get tickets to the two Dead & Company shows coming to Boulder in June, so all-in-all, the day was a win.

waiting to be let into the website 

Today I have been off the Oxy for 24 hours. I feel much more human. I was able to take a proper shower by sticking a chair in the tub and wrapping my knee in Saran wrap. Mom and I walked over to Zorba's (a diner that's a block from my house) - or rather, she walked and I crutched - and we had some breakfast. Later I'm going to do my rehab exercises and lift some weights for my upper body, because I'm definitely using those muscles quite a bit.

using the time to learn by watching the new Ken Burns
docuseries about Benjamin Franklin on PBS

Baby steps.