Thursday, June 9, 2022

 Thursday, June 9, 2022   

 

      I slept almost the whole day. I crawled back into bed in the morning and never got out. My capacity for sleep is almost alarming, but I do love it.

   I was in more pain than yesterday. I knew the pain would start when the anesthesia wore off, but not when to expect it to wear off. I had to make judgment calls while taking narcotics. It was a catch-22. I was taking medication to kill numbed pain but had to judge when I no longer needed it. Huh? I called to speak to the orthopedic advice nurse. It took a while for her to get back to me. I asked her how long I could expect to be in pain. She told me three months. She had no information about this period of immediate recovery. Then she asked me a series of questions. Had I fallen? Was I experiencing heart palpitations or chest pain? Did I feel faint? It was clear she knew nothing. She was only interested in ensuring I wasn’t in medical distress, but she had no information.

   The aftercare advice is terrible. There were several things I should have been told before I left the hospital. I can hear the doctor saying no one else had my problems. That means no one else has complained. This system is downright dangerous. If I had taken my blood pressure medication when I came home, I would have been in danger of passing out and falling. Falling with a newly implanted hip is a no-no. If I hadn’t been monitoring my blood pressure regularly, I wouldn’t have known that it had dropped to below 100 over the low 60s and only raised slightly over 100. What would the impact have been if I had taken the medication? 

  I watched The Land of Steady Habits. All the characters had bad habits, particularly the main character. Watching it was like eating thin soup. Nothing about it was satisfying, but I kept watching, hoping something would change. The film ended on a positive note for the main characters; there were secondary characters that lost their son to drug addiction or possibly suicide. They didn’t have a happy ending. In the end, how these pathetic people managed to do well was a mystery to me, but I was grateful for the ruse. I didn’t have to fall asleep worrying about them.