proceso, no producto...

orrr, not.

I normally love that philosophy I first learned from from my favorite Spanish teacher, "process, not product." But as far as this new knee goes, I'm all about getting this process over and getting the final product.

However, good news is that apparently "I must be a fast healer" as my PT said today, as the process is going very well. Though, if there's one word that I would use to describe this whole process, it would be, irrefutably: weird.

Weird, because...

• One's first surgery experience is necessarily so, I think. I don't remember falling asleep, or waking up. And I never thought I could possibly be so glad for a bedpan as I was at about 2pm on April 24. Thank goodness I was on inhibition-reducing drugs, or else I would probably have refused it...and that just couldn't have ended well.

• When everything you do requires very slow, incremental movements (or in the first week, hardly any movement at all), you get into a time warp. I have been in a time warp for 12 days, almost two weeks since my surgery!! What?? How? (Everything takes so long to do, and with so much concentration and carefulness, that time actually goes by very quickly..and yet I never seem to be getting much done.)

• It's so strange that one week of sitting in a chair weakens you so much that you'll take months and months to recover your strength.

• I feel like an elderly person. In addition to my crutches I have a walker in the kitchen, a cane in the bathroom and a chair in the shower (the last three of which belong to my grandma...who apparently is getting around much better than I am these days). And now that I'm weaning off of one crutch, I am walking (shuffling) even more slowly now.

• Perhaps the strangest (and most wonderful) thing is that I have experienced next-to-no pain this whole time, and with minimal help from strong meds (which I quit after about six days anyway, because they were making me sick!) I think I can only attribute that to the prayers on my behalf, because that definitely makes no sense! So thank you if you prayed!...the doctors did a phenomenal job, or I have a super pain-resisting body, or something, but I am so grateful that on top of the many inconveniences, the only bodily discomfort I've really had to deal with was side affects from the drugs during the first week. Even PT isn't very bad...I didn't even remember to take Tylenol beforehand today and I was fine.

12 days down, about six months to go...but I seriously think I've about finished the hardest part, thank God!!!!!

(that picture was actually the day of the surgery...the Robogirl leg has been gone for about a week now, replaced with a very misshapen-but-getting-stronger-every-day appendage. I'll take that.)