I have been absent from the blogosphere for the last week because I ended up having to have surgery on my knee yes that same knee it turned out that my patella which is my the medical word for my kneecap had actually broken into two pieces and one was coming up my leg and the other one was going down my leg I could show you an X ray but I don’t think you really want to see that do you? No, I don’t think so anyway, so on last week ,on Tuesday I went into the Markham Stouffville Hospital which is our local hospital I went to the fracture clinic and the orthopedic surgeon that I saw there he looked at my X rays and he came in and said this is not good anyway he said this is going to take surgery to fix this the odd thing was that I thought okay that’s all right i’ll have surgery then that’s all fine that’s fine because I think that if you have something surgically corrected and fixed up then nine times out of 10 it actually does work pretty well so I decided OK let’s go ahead with the surgery so the next day I was checked into the hospital and the next morning I was brought in for surgery the surgery wasn’t too long it was maybe only about an hour and what they do is that they take the two pieces of the patella and they use wires to sew them together so I’m hoping that that is what they have done I now have to wear this terrible brace it must weigh about 10 pounds ,the entire thing, and that’s a lot of weight you know to have hanging on your leg there. They didn’t want to put me into a cast as with Parkinson’s might unbalance me . I agreed with them my balance isn’t the best even without it cast that seemed like good plan to not have me in a cast. Just before they took me to the surgery the nurse took my blood pressure and I was amazed it was only 117 over 74 I thought that was pretty good for somebody Waiting to go for surgery to go for surgery don’t you? at least I thought so.
The surgery took about one hour which isn’t too long for surgery I mean I’ve been through previously in my past through 7 1/2 hours of surgery so one hour seems like a pretty reasonable amount of time to spend in surgical operating theatre
I was supposed to be discharged that evening but I was unable to do the stairs well enough you have to be able to go up and down stairs you see to show them that you can do it and I didn’t do it well enough and so they said well we think you better stay here and then tomorrow you can try this again well that really disappointed me great deal but what can you do they were right I couldn’t get up and down those stairs. They also asked me if I had any experience with crutches I said yes but that was many many years ago and I didn’t feel that I was my balance was good enough now to be able to deal with crutches crutches I thought God I’m 75 years old I can’t be dealing with Crutches! So that was the end of the discussion about crutches Anyway I had a walker and it was a very it was a different it was a two wheeled walker now I’ve had a 4 wheel walker and I’m quite used to that but I have not had one that was just a two wheel walker and that was part of my problem .HHoweverwthis weekend our daughter arrived she came down and if I had to go to the washroom which is quite A quite a bit of a walk to get to the washroom from the front room where I am now and she would say she would fall in behind me and she would say ,”walker” “toe” ,”step” and I pushed the Walker out in front of me then “toe” ,and that was that I stepped up with my surgically improved leg and I just put my weight on the toe I’m not supposed to put my whole weight on the foot Step This was for my left foot not operated I can put my full weight onto that teg so she would walk behind me and she’d say Walker( push the walker out) in front of me front and then “toe step, walker, toe, step, walker, walker, toe, step. and honestly it made such a big improvement in my walking that I can’t even tell you how much it improved but it really really really made a big difference She helped me a lot
She helped me remendously me it was such a big help for me! I admired the fact that she had the patience to keep saying over and over and over walker, toe, step. walker, toe, step .walker, toe, step .I mean honestly I couldn’t do that I I could well maybe, I could it would depend on who I was doing it for but if I had to do it for her or for my husaband hen then, of course, I would do my best, but really it’s it takes a lot of patience to keep saying that over and over and over and over and over again
So I spent the night at the hospital and that wasn’t too great but it wasn’t too bad either I mean it’s a fairly quiet hospital I don’t know why that is but it is quite quiet hospital i’ve been in some hospitals where you hear that people are being brought in with gun shoot wounds and things like that are very disturbing to me!
The hospital where my mother died was in fact the hospital where I heard about some one being brought in with a GSW and I knew with aGSW was. That hospital was an inner city hospital in an area that had quite a lot of crime and it didn’t surprise me to hear that there was AGSW was coming in but the Markham Stouffville Hospital is not like that and it was quite quiet overnight and I did sleep on and off
The next morning a physiotherapist came to see me And he said “So “he said we need to do the stairs he said because I really can’t have you go home until you can show me that you can get up and down those stairs he said:” how many stairs do you have to get up to get into your house and do you have banisters? I replied there’s three stairs and then the landing and then another step up to get into the back door we had Bannisters I said ” Yes we do have bannisters we do and “how far apart were they and I said”about out this far apart like this and I demonstrated with my arms he said well that’s great because that’s exactly the same as the stairs that we have here so why don’t we get going on with that now anyway. I went in and this time I was able to get both up and down the stairs without totally disgracing myself
My husband who had been there throughout my entire experience at the hospital he took me home he drove me home he only I don’t drive now because of the Parkinson’s and it’s really more of a cognitive issue than my physical body being unable to drive So he really is a bit of a saint I think and since I no longer drive so he drives me everywhere he really is a saint I think IMHO
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