Laid up in the Plague House

Two weeks ago today my Bride rolled me up to the big south doors at the Providence hospital out by the Banfield where in slightly less than three hours an orthopedic surgeon and his straphangers proceeded to hack open my left knee, part out all the worn-out bits, slam in some aftermarket replacement parts, zip me up and roll me on my way.

Since then all I've been able to do is lie around with one leg in the air, prodigiously bored, and try and distract myself from the results of someone hacking my knee open and replacing all the parts.

The distractions, unfortunately, largely consist of watching the news as the horde of diseased C.H.U.D.s fills places like Providence with sickly COVID patients and try and desperately find something to read.

(So far I've re-read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon - which was good fun the second time around - and slog through Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming, his first volume of a general history of the army in the Revolution. So far Atkinson has been desperately disappointing; decently researched on the military history side, but marred by 1) Atkinson's fanboi pash for the rebels - the Americans are all stalwart, noble, and heroic, the British stodgy, foolish, and faintly ridiculous, and 2) writing at an almost embarrassingly low YA level. Did you know that CPT Prescott, the commander of the redoubt on Breed's Hill, was "azure-eyed"? Ugh.)

I was warned going in that knees are an order of magnitude worse than hips, so it's not so much that I didn't anticipate the long recovery time. It's that I didn't expect the way I feel; weak and sick, like a bad flu, all over - not just an achy leg. I feel utterly whipped most of the time, and it doesn't help that I have to lie in bed with my leg up all day to try and get the post-op swelling down.

The Little Cat has taken it on herself to be my constant companion, which has proved less irking than I'd thought. She doesn't ramble - much, tho when she does her little claws are a hazard - and she's fairly quiet - for her, who is a chatty, meow-y kitty generally - and mostly picks a vacant part of the bed.

But that's the boundary of my world, at least at the moment. My poor Bride is doing the work of a hero AND sleeping on the couch while I loll about in the big bed like some sort of Roman sybarite.

Supposedly the third week post-op is when things improve.

Let's hope so. This is only a fortnight and it's already REALLY old.

Except for the cats. But, then, cats...

Update 8/24: So I'm on my third week post-op and so far the various anecdotes I've heard about this procedure have been pretty much correct. 

The pain is manageable now, other than the nighttime. 

And even that's not really "unmanageable"; it's just that the discomfort level is just barely too high to sleep easily. I've been trying a combination of pain meds and a sleeping pill (technically it's an antihistamine, but it's basically a sleeping pill...) but that hasn't been particularly successful. So the only real issues at this point are 1) sleep, and 2) books, in that I'm still looking for something readable. Tried a usually-decent potboiler (one of the later Jim Butcher Harry Dresden series) and was as grossly disappointed as I have been with the recent ones - dude, you should have stopped before Ghost Story - although the latest in Lois Bujold's Penric and Desdemona series (The Assassins of Thasalon, in case you're interested...) was an all-too-brief treat. I'm still struggling with Atkinson, who is improving now that we've gotten past the Siege of Boston, but is still just not well written (and I should note that I enjoyed his WW2 series immensely; the history was solid and the writing was...well, not this purple.)

I get my first physical therapy today. We'll see how that goes; the damn thing is still really puffy and resists bending - I can do it, but it's a real fight - and I'm gonna bet I'll be sore as a boil tonight.