Yeah, I know, I only made it through the first prequel and my concerns about the flu, which thankfully only lasted about 48 hours. Now it’s almost two weeks after surgery. Whether it’s because I’ve been focusing on healing or because I’m lazy… once again, I ain’t gonna tell you. Suffice it to say that it’s time for a flashback.<\/p>\n
Monday, April 26th, was “ACL Replacement Day”. My little brother Justin was at work, but both my parents and older brother Brent accompanied me to the hospital so they could sit in the waiting room while I was in surgery. And they waited. And waited. And waited. But I’m getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n
As my parents and I were pulling into the parking lot, there was a car backing out of a space in front of us. She moved back in, but we waited (the theme of the day, it seemed), so she backed out and drove past us out of the lot. As she drove by, I looked down and saw her personalized license plate: PSALM35. Since we had a little time in the waiting room before the nurse called me back, Brent looked up that verse of the Bible on his phone and started reading it out loud. Yowza<\/a>.<\/p>\n I heard the nurse call me back a little late, but given that surgery was scheduled for 9:30, I figured the fam wouldn’t be ordering lunch while we were all waiting together. When I got back to my room for the pre-surgery routine, there were bags for my clothes and shoes plus a hospital gown on the bed. The strange part about the gown? The pockets on either side: the right one was round and the left was longer and looked like it had a folded-up paper bag inside.<\/p>\n It turned out that in the pocket on the right, the nurse hooked up a big hose that blew warm air into the gown and puffed it up in various locations—some of my first thoughts included “Ooh, this is toasty!”, “I’ve got boobs!” and “My pecs are ripped!” (I asked if the thing in the left pocket was a barf bag, but they never gave me a straight answer…) They also had a little monitor to check my pulse and blood pressure that clamped over my middle finger; naturally, when they let my family come into the room for a while, I showed Brent the monitor with a big smile on my face.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most surprising thing that happened before surgery was when a nurse came in to put an IV into the back of my hand. The IV was expected—three cheers for pumping drugs into my arm!—but most medical personnel put on rubber gloves before poking patients with sharp objects. Not this dude. He went right in bare-handed, did the job and took off. Weird…<\/p>\n A nurse eventually buzzed off 10-12″ of hair off my leg to clear out space for the surgery. Mind you, the hair was really short, but not gone. Brent was on the swim team in high school and Justin has done some triathlons, so I’m still the only brother who hasn’t shaved his legs.<\/p>\n Then the surgeon, Dr. Randy Lewis, came into the room to say hi really quick and wrote his initials on my right knee to ensure he’d be operating on the correct one. Well, he either wrote his initials or wanted a reminder that it was my right leg.<\/p>\n Some basic info about ACL replacements. There are three sources where they can get the replacement material: the patellar tendon (over the front of the kneecap), the hamstring or one donated from a cadaver. I opted for the first option, although the third held a certain appeal when I imagined accidentally kneeing someone in the head so they could say, “I hear dead people.”<\/p>\n In the hospital, though, I requested a fourth option: a bionic<\/i> knee. And with health care costs the way they are, I figured a single bionic knee could make me the real<\/i> Six Million Dollar Man. (Suck it, Lee Majors!) Alas, they went after the patellar tendon instead.<\/p>\n Things get kinda fuzzy after that (go figure…), but I remember waking up and feeling a really strong need to stay conscious. I was sleepy, but I tried to stay focused. Naturally, as soon as I decided to stop and just doze off, someone came to wake me up. She had some water and offered saltines or graham crackers, so I went for flavor and started eating the crackers between her giving me sips of water. I’m not sure whether the saltines would have had a different effect, but because of the small amount of water the nurse gave me, the last bite of the second cracker felt like I was mixing cement in my mouth.<\/p>\n They brought me to a room where everyone could visit again and it sounded like things went awesomely. Surgery took a little less time than expected, my meniscus had only a very slight tear (they think it should it heal naturally and opted not to cut part of it off), there was a slight tear on my femur’s cartilage that they shaved off… things went awesomely. (Incidentally, they took some pictures from inside my knee and the torn ACL was in shreds—it looked kinda like the underside of a jellyfish.)<\/p>\n I was talking to everyone and still felt a little light-headed—things seemed to wobbling around a little while I was sitting still—but I was ready to head home, so they plopped me into a wheelchair, rolled me to the exit and everyone helped me get into the back seat so I could prop my leg up across it. Time for lunch! In the middle of the afternoon!<\/p>\n