Get Hip!

Well...

You probably know - I complained about it enough - that my right hip went very decidedly bad on me about this time last year.

It'd been coming apart for some time before that; I'd lost about 1/4" to 3/8" off my right leg starting back in about 2011. It was sore, and a little awkward. I went to a couple of orthopods who told me that I'd be getting a new hip...but that if I could hold off longer that I'd be happier with the long-term results.

So I did. And the leg seemed to stop deteriorating; I managed with minimal discomfort and the same shoe lifts I got from the physical therapist in 2011 for about four years.

Then, last winter, the leg really started to go to hell. Painfully, to begin with. It HURT. And I began to really lose bone in the hip joint; by early summer I was an inch shorter on the right side than the left, and was wearing a real no-shit cripple shoe on my right foot just to be able to walk at all. And walking was fiendishly painful. I have a fairly high pain tolerance, and by mid-autumn I was pushing right to the extreme edge of that limit.

I was ready by November to get the damn thing parted out and replaced. But that's when The World's Best Health Care System^TM kicked in. Because I hadn't worked for my current company a full year (never mind that I'd worked for the sonsofbitches damn near four years in my earlier incarnation...) I wasn't covered by the disability insurance policy. AND I would lose my health coverage, period, if I couldn't work 20 hours a week.

So I put off the surgery until March.

On March 1 I went under the knife.

I don't really know what the surgeon did and, frankly, I don't want to know. The entire notion of being opened up like a beef carcass, my femur cut off at the proximal joint, drilled out, and a metal rod slammed into it is faintly sickening. And the surgeon's assistant, questioned afterwards, described an interior hellscape of floating bone chips and towering arthritic spires that had to be picked out or ground off, respectively. I was a mess inside which seems to have gone a long way to explaining how painful the thing was. I had lost a lot of blood in the OR, and my blood pressure remained low for another day or so.

To kill the pain of this flensing I received a spinal anesthetic. This is not a "block", as I had assumed - similar to the epidural that is common for knee surgery or caesarian section - but a general anesthetic delivered through the spine. And it works, delightfully. I awoke Tuesday afternoon in very little pain. I couldn't feel my legs, but, then, hey...there's always tradeoffs, right..?

That happy condition lasted until about Tuesday evening as the spinal began to wear off. I began to take the pain medication - oxycodone, "hillbilly heroin" - at low doses. Not ideal, but...manageable. The OT and PT people got me up and walking, frailly, but walking. The hip hurt, but...differently. This wasn't the deep, grinding pain of the disintegrating joint but post-op pain of sliced and sewn-together muscles.

Wednesday afternoon I was released, and hobbled on my walker down to the main door of Good Samaritan and my Bride in the Subaru.

Getting into and out of a low vehicle when you've had a hip replacement is ridiculously balletic. First you have to lay the seat back far down so you don't have to bend at the waist. Turn backwards to the door. Stick your new hip-leg out and lower yourself down, leaning back until you're almost supine, your legs sticking out the door like a dead mobster in a videogame. Then you scoot far up the seatback - to clear your feet from the front of the doorframe - and swing them inside. Then you slide forward, and if you want you can put the seatback up a bit.

Then you have to do that all backwards to get out. I did, and tottered up the steps, into the house, and into bed.

And that night, the pain came.

The nighttime hours between Wednesday and Thursday might have possibly been the worst of the entire business. I went from 5mg every three hours to 10 to 15; by midnight I was lying awake, unable to find a comfortable position to lie, begging the clock to move to the next time I could take another painkiller. I've been in pain at various times in my life, but that was about as bad as I've ever hurt.

And by Thursday afternoon the pain was, largely, gone.

Not that it was gone-gone. I still hurt when I get up after sitting a long time; the joint stiffens up and I have to hop and limp a couple of steps to loosen it up. But by the weekend I had gone from the walker to a cane. After a month I dropped the cane and haven't needed it since.

I still have, and will always have, a deep gouge in my right hip.

Now I am ten weeks post-op. I have some lingering soreness. As I said; I can't sit for long without stiffening up. But the overall pain and discomfort level is far, far below what I was living with just three months ago. My legs are nearly the same length; I have a half-inch lift in my right leg and always will - until my left leg goes bad and I have to have THAT hip replaced...

I won't pretend that I'm happy about all this. I shouldn't have to have had this hip replaced at all; I'm not sure what happened, whether it was just bad luck or bad genetics or misuse - I did abuse the hell out of my legs when I was younger - or a combination of all the above. But I shouldn't have to have aftermarket parts in my goddamn hip and I'm sure as hell not pleased that I do.

But.

Given that I don't have a choice, the alternatives could be worse. I am free of the constant nagging-to-screaming-out-loud pain I have lived with for nearly five years. I can walk straight again, and hopefully soon dispense with the last of the "precautions" which prevent me from, for example, tying my right shoelaces.

Call no man happy until he is dead. But...I am a happier man than I was back in February, and, perhaps, that is enough. For now.

Agonistes

A friend of mine - who is an intelligent, genuinely decent, loving and compassionate woman - sent me a link to this:

"The face on this week’s People magazine cover is Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old, recently married woman who went public with her plan to take a fatal prescription on November 1, rather than live with her terminal brain cancer until its deadly end. Her reasons include not merely avoiding the suffering she expects to experience, but also protecting her loved ones from the awful reality of watching her deteriorate...her decision—and the notion of assisted suicide in general—troubles me deeply, for a couple of reasons."

I'd heard something vague about this in the way that you "hear about" stories in the electronic press. I had no real thought except "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, what a fucking shitty deal for this poor woman."

And then I went and read the Ellen Dollar essay I've linked to above and read her write stuff like this:

"That death is preferable to living with limitations and pain is a prevalent attitude in our health-worshipping culture, and I worry that assisted suicide reinforces it to a frightening extreme."

and this:

"No suffering, no matter how awful, is without the potential for beauty, revelation, love."

and this:

"This makes me wonder if deep down, we understand that healing happens when we strive to live fully with affliction, rather than try to overcome it at any cost. If our life doesn’t offer us enough pain and struggle, we go find some."

And thought:

No.

No, no, no. Nononononononono.

Fuck no.

Some suffering is just that awful. Lying in bed doped to the eyes because otherwise you'd be screaming in agony and shitting yourself has no beauty, no revelation, other than the horrible revelation of how close to an animal you are reduced when you're screaming and shitting yourself.

Writhing in bloody mud, gouging your heels into the ground because your guts have been ripped out by shrapnel, has no potential for redemption, no bright moment for reflection, has nothing to do with beauty, revelation, and love.

It just sucks hideous ass and a quick and merciful death is a benison and a release.

Anyone who has ever been around war knows people, or knows people who know people, who have shoved 20 grains of morphine into a dying man to release the poor doomed fucker from his horrible agony. I don't believe in Christ myself but I can't believe that the Christ of the Bible, the Christ who is supposed to have died himself to save every swinging richard, would want to prolong that sort of hideous torture by so much as a microsecond.

My understanding is that this Maynard woman knows exactly what Fate has in store for her and it's unspeakable agony; bowel-loosening, mind-destroying pain that will be bearable only through sedation so deep that she will be a brainless thing, a meat-sack kept alive by machines.

That isn't "living with limitations and pain"; that's a freaking nightmare, and I'd suck the muzzle before letting myself experience that sort of horrible death.

So if Ms. Dollar wanted to talk about Christ and suffering and this poor doomed woman she'd have done well to talk about how the Christian prohibition against suicide is a nasty hangover from a tribal religious past, about how God's love promises us rest after pain and suffering, and about how faith should reassure us that after we take the hemlock we will awaken to a New Jerusalem.

Or, well, maybe just STFU and let the poor damned doomed woman die in peace. But, hey, that's just me.

But - at the very, very least - not blather on about the potential for beauty and love in death agony.

Anyone who says that there is any dignity in suffering has never actually seen actual suffering.