Pushing Through

Oy, da pain….! Only my enemies should know such pain…. –The Bubbie, in Crossing Delancey

I’m in Day Three after coming home from the hospital after my first total knee replacement surgery.

I am not having fun. I just want to go on record as saying that right now.

Not only am I not having fun, I am beginning to lose my belief that there will ever be such a thing as fun again.

Not only am I not having fun, I am no longer a spiritual person who believes in seeing the meaning in all experience, in order to be lifted–along with the rest of humanity–to a higher plane of existence and limitlessness. I would, in fact, just settle for a decent night’s sleep, one in which I did not have to spend hours trying to re-teach my body how to settle into a position that will not hurt and will allow me to leave it behind for awhile.

My hair has not been washed in nearly a week.

My new knee is swollen to the size and appearance of a Scottish haggis. Apparently this is “normal.”

I do not enjoy taking the opiates that have caused such a frenzy of addiction and judgment in our culture. They probably have their uses, and this is probably one of them, if only because I am more willing to go through the rehabilitation exercises and movement required to make this thing work, but I do not find them fun.

I gather that some people do. Damn.

My mouth tastes like the bottom of a birdcage. The aforementioned drugs cause this, and cause such dryness that I wake up with my mouth glued shut in the night. I imagine I may have friends out there who think this might not be such a sad state of affairs, but friends….it is not fun.

We are having a lovely, but sometimes rainy Spring here in the Piedmont, and this, for some reason, causes my house to smell like an old catbox.

We do not have a catbox. We have a cat, but she knows her place.

My house looks more and more like a hospital emporium, with stacks of generic stuff in every room, while I try to figure out how to live through this time. My poor husband, my guardian angel, tries to keep up with my carping and ongoing demands, while sorting through it and maintaining some semblance of order and peace, both of which are very important to me.

I am not a nice person. I am a greasy, cranky old woman who is increasingly disinterested in any of the support mechanisms I thought would get me through this.

Tell me, why do people have cable TV? Nearly one hundred channels, and not one damned thing worth watching.

I can’t sit at my big computer (I’m on my iBook at the moment, kicked back in my armchair with my leg supported by a stack of pillows), because my leg is too stiff to fit under it. No fun for me.

I have fantasies of gangrene, death, unremitting misery. I feel like Billy Crystal, who in When Harry Met Sally mentioned that he was such a dark personality that he always read the end of a novel before the beginning, because if he died before finishing the book, he’d know how it came out.

My inherently Jewish soul emerges in this night of pain, beckoning me to suffer well and to keep a sense of humor about it.

I am not sure I am doing this, but there doesn’t seem to be much else to do, so I keep trying.