The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All us geezers, gathered at a party or meeting on the street, love to answer that age old greeting: how ya doing? How we’re doing is rehabbing from our latest surgery or illness or dental work. Our mortal coils are unraveling and the best therapy we can think of, evidently, is to share with others the boring saga of infections, scar tissue, radical pain, medications and the entire kitbag of medical interventions. Same as I’m probably doing here….

Last physical therapy session I had in Stanwoodopolis following my total knee replacement, sitting with my leg wrapped in an ice pack on a stool, my therapist pointed me out to a woman leaning heavily on her two wheel walker and said he’s had the same thing. Meaning my knee. She was quite a bit younger than me, probably quite a bit younger than most of us who replaced our original knee with the titanium bionic one. She looked pitiful. Course we probably all look pitiful in there, struggling to regain lost muscle strength, enduring pain, wondering why God would do this to his creations.

She shook her head after nodding hello and said, “I never dreamed it would be like this, this hard. And I’m supposed to have the other one done too. I don’t know if I can do this twice.” If I hadn’t been sitting, ice pack strapped to my knee, I would have put an arm around her shoulder in sympathetic commiseration, that’s how empathetic I felt. This knee replacement was harder than she or I ever expected. But unlike her, I only have to do one, not both. The dread she was feeling was palpable and I thanked my lucky stars my ordeal would be getting easier now, not back to Go with knee #2.

The trouble she’s got, of course, is if she skips the second operation, what good was the first? All that misery for nothing. Life is sometimes like this, nothing to do but grit your teeth and plow ahead. She’s got way more years ahead than me and maybe the pain now is a lot less than the pain carried all those years. Next therapy session maybe I’ll offer up this kind of unwanted advice. She’ll probably have some for me. Like mind my own damn business….