Normal/Not Normal

Today is 3 weeks post-surgery, and I vacillate between wanting everything to be back the way it was pre-surgery (minus the pain, of course) and wanting to continue to do mostly nothing interspersed with bouts of inertia and moments of fugue. I started teaching a little last week, and it was both exhilarating and exhausting: I loved feeling that teaching groove of expressing exactly what I mean in clear and concise terms, and immediately afterward I wanted a quiet dark room and a cool compress, because apparently life is more tiring now that I am INTEGRATING A PROSTHESIS INTO MY MARROW HELLO.

I behave the same way around other people: when offered assistance, I counter with "I can totally do this, thank you but I'm fine," but when no hand is held out, my mental dialogue vibrates with a self-righteous "oh my god I'm exhausted why on earth would you think that I could carry a plate of food by myself."

In school last semester I learned about cognitive dissonance (or rather, I was finally given a name for it): the act of holding two opposing concepts in our minds at the same time. Our human dislike for this jarring, discomforting sensation often leads us to validate one idea over the other for the pure mental relief, regardless of actual value. "I am a regular person just like you/ My needs are special and must be acknowledged" is my dissonant song lyric du jour. I can go to the store and carry a shopping basket,  but when someone holds the parking elevator to squeeze in an extra couple and their cart, I exude irritation from my pores and shift to make sure everyone can see my cane.


F. Scott Fitzgerald said "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." I'll keep working on the function part.

I Got My Hip Replaced

So that, as they say, happened. On Tuesday.

What I do now is I lie around a lot, and when that gets too tiring, I sleep. I'm also enjoying eating constantly and never really feeling full (apparently I'm eating for two), and repeatedly asking people I love to do the same menial tasks over and over ("Can I get the ice pack?" "Can you put this ice pack in the freezer and get the other ice pack?" "Can I have some water?" "Can you get up from being totally asleep next to me and go make me some breakfast and some coffee?" "Can I have the other ice pack again and can you put this one back in the freezer?").

I have the same supine PT exercises they gave me after the last surgery, but what is very, very different is how astonishingly little pain I am feeling. This is day four post-surgery, and I am taking Aleve. Only. No Vicodin, no Percoset, not even any Tramadol. And I am full weight-bearing, with one crutch. I can't quite explain how mind blowing this is to me, after my last experience, but I am enormously grateful, and let's be honest, also enormously lopsided in the one hip (and by the way - if you ever have a shit ton of time and want to read about the minutiae of a much more difficult, much more painful surgery that took a lot longer to recover from, read my heart-wrenching, fascinating blog about it, brilliantly entitled "Paper Or Dysplastic?").

Part of my PT is to also walk as much as I can handle, which is not yet much, but I'm hoping my energy will come back soon (it's not for a lack of eating, I can tell you that much). I think the hip might be eating my energy, as it is, for the third time now, swole up to twice the size of the other. I don't know how many times it can take this swoled business. Anyway, can you get me the ice pack (and a coffee)?

Best Laid Plans

When I embarked on this mid-life crisis madcap comedy movie return to school adventure last fall, I had a general idea that I would finish in five years. I had 11 pre-requisite classes to take before the three-year graduate degree, and it seemed… possible to do them in two years? Hard, but manageable, especially if I didn’t plan to have a life outside of community college, and didn’t mind being in summer school all the way through (the DPT includes summer school), and possibly a winter session or two.

And then, of course, life started happening, and more specifically, arthritic hip raised its ugly head (of the femur! Yuk yuk. Nerd joke). Hip replacement surgery was no longer a far-off possibility, but a right now necessity. Still, I persisted. I sat down with my pre-req list and worked out a whole strategy that would allow me to get everything done and enroll in the fall of 2013. Lest you think the schedule I created was a leisurely educational stroll, I present it to you in haiku form:

Summer session – hip replaced –

Labor Day? Who the

Fuck are you kidding?

(Maybe not the best haiku, and maybe doesn’t even convey the reality of what I was planning on doing to myself, so instead I present to you my leisurely educational stroll in calendar form:)

Summer 2012 – Human Biology / test into Pre-calculus

August 2012 – Hip replacement class*

Fall 2012 – Pre-calculus / Anatomy / take GRE

Winter 2012 – Statistics / apply to grad schools

Spring 2013 – Physics/ Physiology

Summer 2013 – Physics

Fall 2013 DPT begins

*not a class

Looking at this list gives me hives. Unnecessary Hives, which is also the name of my autobiography. Some time last week, between interviewing hip surgeons and studying for my organic chemistry exam, I realized that there was no actual reason why I HAD to finish in five. My stubborn attachment to the five-year plan was a) Not Very Yogic, though I feel like often lately I’m Not Very Yogic (and while we’re on the topic, that seems a more likely autobiography title) and b) a by-product of a trick I constantly play on myself to get things done, called “Tell Everybody You Are Doing Something And Then You Have To Do It.”

At my brother’s wedding in Palm Springs four years ago, when I was still living in New York but feeling more and more like I could leave, I went around the entire reception telling people that I was moving to LA (though apparently I did not tell my mom, who was surprised to learn it from a cousin later that night). The desire not to go back on my words propelled me more rapidly towards a destination I would have reached eventually – but as I left the reception, casually flinging the words “See you next year!” to the Angelinos present (my future friends!) my fate was writ in cement.

In the same way, starting this blog with the pronouncement that I would be in school for five years made it, in my mind, an unchangeable truth. In addition, and you can add this to the Not Very Yogic column: I am terrifically impatient when I want something. I had wrapped my head around five years’ worth of school: how old I would be when I got out (don’t ask), what year it would be, what great career shifts would finally come to fruition. An additional year seemed truly unbearable, and sacrificing my free time and sanity seemed the best solution. I know that sounds ridiculous, and yet it felt violently true.

But letting go of that self-induced stressor (because that’s all it was) and giving myself room to breathe (what a concept, Not Very Yogic lady) and actually enjoy my life for the next few years (again, who knew that was an option) has created space for all kinds of things I was going to give up in the name of my set in stone plans. Like travel! And writing more! And hanging out with other people! And cadaver dissection! (It’s a form of hanging out with other people.) And how about this concept: giving myself adequate time to recover from having a freaking hip replaced.

So there it is. I’m taking the slightly longer road not yet traveled. More importantly: I’m not freaking out about it. Maybe I’m a Little More Yogic than I thought.