...my knee doesn't get better?
I just had this thought this afternoon after I did another round of PT exercises where I stretch and bend my knee. It feels like a thick cord is inside my knee (which there is, kind of) and it doesn't want to stretch. Then it feels like a balloon that is full of sand or putty or a cranberry log the comes in a can that people ate on Thanksgiving in the 1970's when pre-prepared food was cool.
What if my knee doesn't get better? What if I can't bend it past 120 degrees and get up stairs? I am not suggesting that my surgeon or physical therapy team would be at fault. What if I have a slow healing knee, or some unusual form of scar tissue that causes a strange blockage that is not unheard of but nor is it non-exisistent? You know, the opposite of a miracle -- the one out of a million bad thing that could happen but rarely does because the odds are so low.
Why am I feeling so miserable and down now? Clearly, the novelty of hanging around the house icing my knee is wearing off. I think it is something else: I am having to cause myself pain five times a day when I try to bend my knee. It is a very strange thing to have to cause myself agony, but the reason I do it is because the idea of having a mediocre knee for the rest of my life is unpalatable. I know there are folks out there with far worse permanent disabilities. If I were five years old, my parents might have said, "Quit your belly-aching!" But damn this sucks.
I was at my luncheon today (yay!) and I saw my friend Tina. She was horrifically mugged and assaulted when she was 23. The guy stabbed her and cut the nerves in her hand. She had to go to physical therapy to regain motion in her hand. She said she felt like the Hulk having to move her hand. She couldn't touch her fingers to her thumb, and doing the exercises to make that happen were agony. But she survived, and today fluttered her fingers around as if nothing had ever happened.
That is what I am hoping for -- I am longing for the day where I will look at my knee and walk as if nothing had ever happened.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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