Home and Recovering :)

Damie and Cayenne- done with surgeries and on to snuggling and recovery!

Cayenne and I are going to be snuggling, recovery buddies this weekend. This past Wednesday, she had surgery on her back foot and had part of one toe removed. When we found her, almost exactly one year ago, she had trauma to one foot and limped quite a bit. The nail in one toe never grew back correctly from the damage and some weird, corny thing come back in the nail's place and started growing through the pad on her toe. Ouch! So we have been calling her our 3-legged devil for the past year! :) We thought the foot might heal on it's own with time or the pain would reside, but day after day we watched her limp in pain. We finally decided to get that part of her toe removed and help her gain some functional mobility (I write TOO many PT evals).

Anyhoo- Cayenne is doing great and snuggling with me and Roo right now. :)



The funny thing is, I planned Cayenne's surgery around mine, because I figured we could take care of each other :) I am home now with an arsenal of movies, the laptop, and The Historian as my book for the weekend. I am not going to lie, I was a little scared going in to surgery. I didn't make some of the surgery decisions until the minute before they wheeled me into the room, but I just prayed to God to give me the correct answer.

I was supposed to call the doctor tonight and talk to him about what he saw and what procedures he did to my knee. I was so nauseous for the first few hours, though, that I wasn't in any frame of mind to talk- so I will call tomorrow and get the low-down. The hard part post surgery has really been the throwing up, but now that I am over that I feel fine. Of course the knee hurts, but the pain meds are doing their job. :)

Cayenne, Roo, and I are going to live on the pull-out couch for the weekend and do all of the fine couch potato stuff possible! Happy weekend to everyone- and with my newly acquired free time I will do some catching up on my blog reading too!

Stages Of Grief?

I flipped through my Triathlon Life magazine today and looked for anything remotely interesting. Maggi Finley's name was in there with her nice Nationals performance, so that was fun. Otherwise I find the magazine a little boring. I did come across an article about the stages of grief during an injury and I decided to get in tune with my inner Kubler-Ross and anazlyze myself.

1. Denial- nope. Don't remember being in denial. I remember feeling really injured. Oh wait, I did try to race at the end of May. Maybe I was in denial about how serious it was really turning out to be. Maybe I was in denial about how long it would take me to recover from my injury. I remember swimming 20,000 yards one week to stay in shape so I could jump right back into racing. You won't catch me swimming that much now! I know better!

2. Anger- All of those dern treadmill tempo runs at 5am (twice as bad) down the tube. Oh, and those killer Peddler rides that forced me to learn to hurt? All for naught. I guess I was a little mad to work so hard on my fitness and never get a chance to use it.

3. Bargaining- I know I for sure did this one. "I will just do a little sprint, and I promise to walk if it hurts." That was my favorite bargaining tool.

4. Depression- oh, that must be referring to the two months I just stopped doing everything besides eating cheesecake. I stopped going to swim class, stopped going to yoga, and just stopped caring. I mean, really, what is the point in trying to stay in shape when you are clearly so out of shape?

5. Acceptance- finally, I have made it to the last stage and I am moving on.

I knew that degree in psychology would come in handy some day! Har har har- seriously, I am really happy to be moving forward with this. Plus, I get to miss two days of work, so that is more of a thrill than anything else. Whatever happened to fall break?

Scheduled!

The long awaited surgery has been scheduled.  This Friday we will fix everything.  

Just kidding-  but if only that were true.  What do you mean you can't make my knees feel like they did when I was 16?  Oh, maybe not 16, I was sitting on the bench with a torn MCL.  How about a 10 year-old's knees?  Yes, I have been dealing with right knee injuries for a longgggg time.  My dad made me feel a lot better about my decision to have surgery when he reminded me of all of the injuries I have had to the right knee since high school.   

This Friday we will attempt to take care of a few small things.  I am actually going to have two small surgeries.  (Dave calls them procedures and didn't even bother taking off of work, but I think anytime they put you to sleep and make you sign a waiver saying you could die, that counts as surgery.  Okay, so maybe I am milking it a bit, but I would like to babied a little :)  

If you want to know-First we are going to do a posterior incision in the back of the knee joint/hamstrings in order to get the cyst.  It is embedded in my hamstrings somewhat and we can't get it through a scope.  Then we are going to do a scope and look for meniscus damage as we are pretty sure there is a medial tear somewhere- and fix it.  We area also going to remove some bone spurs that are pretty significant and hitting the femur.  

The only other possibility is a limited lateral release.  The doc says yes, and I say I don't know.  So, we will decide on Friday- although I am still leaning towards no.  There would have to be something really, really convincing to make me change my mind.

We aren't touching the femur.  I know, I know- the biggest elephant in the room and I am just ignoring it for now.  No need to go crazy on my knee, you know?  The doc made some suggestions, but none sound good to me so I can be patient and wait for the right thing.  

So, that is that!  I have actually felt a lot of relief with the decision.  I don't know what the outcome will be, but it feels good to move forward.  

In all honesty, Dave feels really bad now because we found out someone has to be with me through the entire surgery, and he can't be there.  (Don't worry, papa is a worthy replacement).  And then, Dave found out he has to work the entire weekend and can't baby me at all!  So, if you are in the mood to coddle a pitiful 31-year-old, please feel free to stop by over the weekend and don't forget the cheesecake.