Good news so far: I did not die during surgery! I have not lost the leg…YET.

Wednesday night (the surgery was Tuesday morning) I had to go to the ER for pain, and that was miserable (it hurt too much to sit down, which is why I was there, so I had to stand with my walker for hours in the middle of the night—which, to be fair, I would have had to do at home if not at the ER). But I had a nice ER doctor who said that the pain medication I was on was for “delicate old people, and BABIES,” and gave me a shot of Di1audid which did nothing for the pain but knocked me right out, and then in the morning Paul called the surgeon who saw us a few hours later and prescribed 0xyc0ntin and m0rphine, and now I can sleep, and sit, and do my little exercises. (The surgeon had not prescribed the 0xyc0ntin earlier, because another doctor 20 years ago said I was allergic to Perc0cet, and people allergic to Perc0cet but not acetaminophen are allergic to 0xyc0ntin. But I am taking the 0xyc0ntin and, separately, acetaminophen, with no allergic reaction. This means mathematically that I am NOT allergic to Perc0cet, and now let’s see how difficult that is to get changed in my records.) (I hope this is all making sense. The pain medications don’t make me feel high, but they do make my thinking feel gappy.)

I am in that stage of recovery where I wake up, make my way to the bathroom, brush my teeth, take my pills, eat some breakfast, wash my face, redo my ponytail, do my physical therapy exercises—and it’s lunchtime and I need a nap. The whole day goes like that. I have not read one single book or magazine. I have broken some of my Wordle and phone-game streaks. It wasn’t until three days after the surgery that I managed to take a patchy sponge bath and change my clothes. I’d thought I was going to binge-watch TV series and be really bored, but the whole day is just eaten up.

I am fairly covered in bruises. It took three tries to do the IV, and I have a big decorative bruise for each one, and also a bunch of pretty bruise-dots where they put the tourniquet. The surgical leg is 1.5 times the width of the other, and is very bruised, including a big garter-like dotted bruise where they put THAT tourniquet. The ER doctor clucked over me in a pleasing way: “Oh, look at this. My goodness. What did they do to you.”

Today (Saturday) is the first day I’ve had an appetite. Paul has been putting food in front of me and I eat it and it tastes good and makes me feel better, but today is the first day I’ve thought of food and wanted some.

I can go up and down stairs with a cane and the railing, but I need someone else to carry my walker up/down and meet me with it when I arrive. If this were going to go on longer than a couple of weeks, I would get a second walker; as it is, people are home anyway and it’s no big deal to ask one of them to transport the walker.

I am still sleeping in the recliner downstairs, even though I can do the stairs. There are several reasons which now seem almost too boring to list. The number of times I get up in the night, and how much noise I make doing so. I can’t roll over anyway, and it’s easier to sleep on my back in a recliner than in a bed. Paul’s snoring. A series of events that meant Paul would be gone in the early morning and I would be stranded upstairs until the kids woke up. The complication of middle-of-the-night medications. Anyway I am still in the recliner, but hope to soon be back in a bed.

I have put my earrings back in. I took them out as instructed for the surgery, and my ears felt weird and naked. But it wasn’t until three days later that I gathered the necessary resources to put most of them back in.