A Moment Of Excruciating Whatever

During lifetime, I remember my first knee surgery. The pain was so intense for the first three days that I needed morphine every four hours. I remember the horror of lying and sweating. The latter was from intense pain. I had two more operations on my knees after that.

During hip replacement, they dislocated the hip, sawed the end off and drove a titanium replacement into the bone. It was six weeks before I could put weight on the hip, and then it was a gradual return to some part of recovery, even though my cancer made full movement more difficult.



I won't even talk about the close brushes I had with death during my fight with leukemia, except for the one occasion when a doctor used a scalpel to remove the line from my chest when he should not have. After slicing it in half, a piece went into my bloodstream. I spent 90 minutes on a table, while he and another radiologist fished that piece out by running a wire through an artery in my groin. It was not fun.


And then I had these wrappings. In the first picture, my grandchildren give me piece. Tommy sat on one side, and Jack sat on the other side. Then Anna decided she wanted to be by Pop Pop too, while we watched an incredible Japanese animated film entitled Spirited Away. It was fun having them by me. Most evenings were like this, and every one was nice, because I had all three grandchildren with me. It was like Christmas.

This picture shows the extent of the wrappings. The swelling, due to the physical changes I saw after chemo and other medications, became increasingly impossible to deal with for me. It was a relief to find a doctor who could help us.

Dr. Mulvey had told me that wrappings were a possibility, but I was not ready. Other doctors did not really give me much hope for any improvement. Finally, the swelling made me realize that anything would be better than what I was seeing. Since early childhood, I could not stand to have anything between my toes. Flip flops were never an option for me. And if while putting on a pair of pants, I accidentally had a thread go between my toes, I would almost put my foot through the bottom of the denim jeans. My dad had the same sensitivity in his feet too.

When the physical therapist started wrapping my toes, I watched my Annie. She put her hand over her mouth, so that she wouldn't laugh out loud. She told me later how pale I turned. In all of the medical procedures I endured in my life, I never felt the discomfort I felt at that moment. And I wore those bandages all week long, getting them changed the next morning.