Au Revoir Immortality

I hadn’t thought before about how much recovering from surgery resembles what Hospice likes to call the grieving process and death researchers call the steps to acceptance. There even appear to be the same stages although in different forms and emphasis: denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance (more or less) among them.

This correlation really shouldn’t be surprising now I think about it. Surgery, after all, usually entails loss. In many cases, it means parting company with some body part, even if in my case it was a torn and useless meniscus. The impact on the body is still enormous and there is certainly suffering of one kind or another. My sister, Wendy, told me she was on morphine for two months after she had knee replacement and I’ve been on Tylenol for the past three weeks for a supposedly kinder procedure.

Of the four stages, I empathize most with the denial part of the process since I went into the surgery with a large dose of it. I lapped up the surgeon’s telling me that the operation was routine and non-invasive, which I, of course, took to mean that I’d walk out of the hospital in some slight discomfort that I would nobly overcome and set a recovery record for this type of surgery in a woman my age. Ha.

I really should have known better as I sat in the surgeon’s waiting room where the closed-circuit television continuously played some video about animals—not your usual cutey-pie stuff but footage showing a wolf cutting out a baby caribou from its mother, chasing it down, and killing it, followed by a killer whale hunting down seals for dinner and eating them in the middle of waves died red from their blood. The images of rending flesh should have warned me to give up my daydreams.

But the anger part was a good second. I couldn’t get the surgeon’s office to return my phone calls asking them what I could do about my painfully cramping calf and thigh muscles that the pain meds weren’t touching. When I limped in at last with gritted teeth to get the stitches out, I learned that the office admitted to internal communications challenges and they hadn’t received my messages. If I hadn’t been so grateful to just be free, I might have said something unrepeatable. Instead, I just vented my feelings that evening to Sid, who patiently listened to me and reminded me I had survived and was on the road to recovery. I realize now that I needed to be angry about something at that point, if only to express the shock of having my body invaded and two weeks of pain.

The bargaining part of the process came afterwards—at the start of the three weeks of physical therapy I’m now embarked on. In comparison to the cramping, bending and stretching the knee is a breeze. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to negotiate how fast the physical therapists expect me top do things like squat—my latest nightmare. The therapists, of course, will get me to do whatever I need to despite my bleats. The negotiation is merely letting me have the illusion of control over my life, which, I suspect, is what terminal patients are trying to regain.

Yes, I’m coming along. But the surgery has made an impression on me. I’m being forced to accept that maybe my body is that of a senior lady, even if she has been something of a jock in her day. I’m not going to parachute or bungee jump, nor am I going to ride roller-coasters or speed boats. I’m not going to try to advance my skiing skills beyond where I am and I’ll leave the steep stuff (where I first got injured) to Generation X; I heartily wish them luck in avoiding injuries. In fact, I am not going to be anything other than wary to avoid obvious threats to my body. Now I know I can get hurt.

I guess you could say I’ve been grieving the realities of what time does to even an active body. The usual creaks, aches, and limitations of age are mine now and I’m not going to avoid them. It’s really too bad because I don’t feel my age—or maybe just don’t want to. In fact, I guess what I’ve primarily accepted (finally, you might say), is that I am not immortal. Shucks.