It was August 2013 when I sat waiting for what seemed like an eternity in the office of an orthopedic surgeon at the Complex Joint Clinic at Vancouver General Hospital.
Suddenly the door flew open and my surgeon, a man whom I had previously never laid eyes on, burst into the room and said in rapid succession, “OK, we’re going to replace that knee and give you your life back. It’s an easy procedure, maybe an hour, and then you’re done.” (He spoke so quickly, I wondered at the time if his second career was that of an auctioneer.)
To say I was surprised was an understatement. My knee had been bothering me for several years following an injury, but until that moment I assumed it just needed a little tweaking, maybe a minor procedure involving a couple of stitches. But a whole new knee? I wrongly assumed I wasn’t old enough for such drastic surgery, but quickly found out that wasn’t the case.
I was so taken aback I forgot to ask any questions of the surgeon during our brief meeting before he scribbled out requisitions for blood work and an ECG and then dashed back out the door. When I noticed an X-ray of my knee up on his computer screen I snapped a picture of the image with my phone and fired it off to my partner’s daughter, a doctor. I was hoping for a second, less-drastic opinion. But no such luck.
My initial surprise and fear eventually calmed down to a casual nonchalance as the months passed and I heard nothing from my surgeon. But when almost a year later I received a surgery date via a message left on our voicemail at home, the terror returned with a vengeance, where it remained until I sat in my hospital bed at VGH this past July waiting to get rolled into the operating room. Suspecting I might make a run/hobble for it, my partner asked the nurse hooking up my IV, “Is there any chance she can get an Ativan?” It was a good call because 15 minutes later I had calmed down considerably, despite the fact my surgery was postponed for almost two hours. The next thing I remembered was waking up in the recovery room wondering who had replaced my left leg with a tree trunk.
The rule of thumb for knee and hip replacement surgery is you can’t leave the hospital until you can make it to the washroom on your own and, in my case, master a set of stairs. Unfortunately, the morphine drip they gave me for pain made me so sick I was unable to attempt any of those tasks for almost three days and had to spend five long days at VGH. And as wonderful as the nurses were to me, those five days were nothing short of a living hell. On my first night in hospital, a male patient was brought into my ward room accompanied by police. The man had almost lost a leg to a beating that, from what I could understand, had come as the result of a drug debt. What police and hospital staff didn’t know was that when they weren’t in the room, the man continued to make drug deals from the phone next to his bed.
The next night I woke up in the middle of the night to overhear a nurse asking a second new male patient, “Do you ever have thoughts of suicide?” followed by, “What about thoughts of violence?” By this time I was trying to figure out how to escape my room in case of attack, without projectile vomiting, with a knee I had not yet walked on. (I was entitled to a semi-private room through my group insurance, but was consistently told that none was available.)
As for the food –– it was so disgusting I didn’t eat for three days. Once I finally felt up to it, I began taking photos of my meals and posting them on social media much to the horrified amusement of friends and family. The day my sister showed up with fresh strawberries and grapes was one of my happiest ever.
On day five, as I sat counting the seconds until my partner showed up to break me out, he called to say his car had been hit by a TransLink bus. I did finally make it home and after a couple of rough weeks and two months of rehabilitation began to feel better and get moving.
Last week I went for the official follow-up with my surgeon, who pronounced my knee in great shape, which I wholeheartedly concur. So while the journey to get my new knee might not have been a pleasant one, I would do it all over again. In fact, during a recent shopping trip to California I managed a 12-hour day without so much as a Tylenol, a feat that would have left me crippled prior to surgery.
