I’m having more surgery on Oct. 25, a week from Monday. They’re doing what’s called an osteochondral allograft, where they remove the broken part of my knee that hasn’t healed properly and replace it with cartilage and bone from a cadaver. Now that the surgery is getting closer, I’m pretty nervous. Kind of in a good way, kind of in a bad way. The alternative is a total knee replacement, and once you get one of those, there’s no going back. This surgery has a high success rate and my surgeon comes highly recommended. Plus he’s a good guy and you can tell he really cares. That helps a lot.
I still wish none of this had never happened, that I could go back in time and tell myself not to walk to CVS that night. (Or at least not to assume that just because I crossed the street with the Walk light and inside the crosswalk, that meant I was safe. Hey, I was new to DC.) But it did happen, and this surgery is my best option for making a full recovery, or at least as close to it as I’ll ever get.
Last month I showed you guys my knee brace. Do you want to see what my leg looks like after I’ve been walking around with it for a while? Well, here it is anyway:
It’s actually not as uncomfortable as it looks, and it sure beats walking with crutches. Which I’ll be back to doing pretty soon… The brace works by transferring my not-inconsiderable weight from the broken part on the outside to the unbroken part on the inside. Now the inside has this weird blister/rash on it. “That’s not the first time you’ve had scrapes on your knees, huh, Treach?” Ha ha, you are funny because you’re hilarious.
Starting today, I can’t take any aspirin or ibuprofen until after the surgery. Tylenol is okay. It doesn’t work as well as the ibu, but it’s better than nothing.
As far as the blog goes, I’ve got a few guest-bloggers lined up in my absence. I’ll probably be posting sporadically at best for a few weeks. I sure don’t want to miss Election Day, though. If laughter really was the best medicine, that day I’d be doing some Irish dancing. But it’s not. The best medicine is Dilaudid.