adjustments

Thoughts on being 70 and having a new knee put in:

In the middle of the night, I get up (very awkwardly) and shuffle my walker to the bathroom. Ed, who is still downstairs, says that it sounds like the scratchy noises of ghosts in a haunted house attic.

I was told it would take a while to reclaim a good night's sleep. "Every day you will add an hour." Turns out to be true. I'm up earlier than early.

Since Ed now has to feed the animals in the morning, he comes down with me and we bump into each other a lot in the kitchen, in part because there is a chair with a drip bowl in the middle of the kitchen floor, in part because I have a clumsy walker, and in part because we are not used to navigating the small kitchen space at the same time in the wee hours of the morning. 

I am surprised to see that I am better at (assisted) walking than I am at sitting or manipulating my leg. (Manipulating it is the worst!). This means that I have no problem fixing breakfast, though I haven't the dexterity of yore. I spill blueberries everywhere. No, I cannot easily pick up berries from the floor. Ed tells me I have to "rein in my clumsies" in the days to come.

Normally, we eat a late breakfast, but this wont do in my post-op mode. I have a thousand pills to take and they all prefer to be taken with food. So I start alone, but pretty soon, Ed gives up on sleep and joins me. 

Not for long though. Someone has to clean up after Dance. [We have a bulimic cat: she cannot resist eating any food left out for others. And then she throws it up because it is, of course, too much. If we keep track of her access to food, all's fine, but if she lands something unfinished by, say, Pancake, then we're in trouble!]

Doing exercises takes soooo much time.

Ed dutifully refills my ice pack machine with his home spun supply of ice. I am so surprised at how sweetly attentive he is to all my needs. Always good natured, always asking what else he could do. Like him, I value independence so I don't ask for much help. Still, he is a good tender of a very busted up and stapled in knee!

Sometime in the early afternoon he proposes we walk. I am actually supposed to do that in short spurts, but I can't imagine what he would get out of it: I drag long like a reluctant snail! Still, he insists it would be good for the both of us. I need a smooth surface for my walker so we go to the new development where he studies the newest construction methods and I shuffle slowly along. Exhausting? You bet!

I am not using the camera much, but I do take a pic of the flowers on the table. They're nothing more than grocery store flowers, but in spring, even those can be sublime: peonies and tulips! Magnificent!

What's blooming outside right now? The same thing that's blooming inside!

I do squeeze in a bit of gardening! One pot, at the front of the walkway to the house, has every bloom in it chomped off by the chickens. That cannot be! I stick in a cosmos and cross my fingers that the chickens will leave it alone. How do I get down to ground level? Same way I did with my busted knee before surgery: spread legs very wide and bend at the waist. It can be done! Though I wouldn't recommend it unless it's an emergency. Replacing an entryway decimated flower is an emergency.

Tomorrow is a wild day, in the best of ways. I mean, you're only 70 once, right?