My Left Knee

You won’t be hearing from me for a while, maybe forever. Having reached Medicare age, I am required by law to have a knee or hip replacement. My wife plays serious bridge and all of her fellow addicts are either a) old or b) on life support. And there doesn’t seem to be a single one among them who hasn’t got as titanium joint — or two or three.

In this town, they’ve all been done by the same guy who has an assembly line that would put Ford’s River Rouge plant in its heyday to shame. He does eight or more knees one day and as many hips the next. Naturally, he’s doing me.

Having never had a major surgery, I didn’t know what to expect other than pain, suffering, disappointing results and bankrupting expense. So I did my research. The hospital and doctor’s office were only too happy to show me grisly animated drawings of my insides dissected.

Since I consider my body my mortal enemy and doctors its evil henchmen, I tried to avert my eyes. But I was also educated in what to expect after the cutting ended. It turns out a lot can happen, other than success. Take my catheter-induced urinary tract infection, please.

There’s the drug-resistant superbug hospital infections like MRSA, staph, flesh-eating bacteria, brain-eating bacteria, a host or others straight out of the scariest horror movies. The obvious solution is to never, ever enter a hospital without a hazmat suit, even to visit or to deliver flowers. It’s like a plague zone. Letting someone cut you open in such a place is like drinking the water in Flint or vacationing in Chernobyl.

Then there’s the risk of excessive bleeding and the alternative risk of blood clots in your lungs or brain causing death or strokes or a long happy life drooling in a wheelchair with your lights out permanently. To combat these, you are denied painkillers before the operation so you won’t bleed, then given blood thinners after so you will. This would appear to require very careful calibration or something can go sideways. And as we all know, careful calibration is a rare accomplishment.

Speaking of the dying of the light, the anesthesia can make you stupid. So if you go in with adequate intellect and bad knees, you can come out with glorious knee recaps but most information gone, recall gone, processing time degraded, ability to deduce, compute, get jokes, balance the checkbook or remember your name AWOL. In short, you emerge a Trump voter, with no chance for Jeopardy glory. But you will be able to climb the stairway to heaven.

If none of that happens, they get you heavily gooned on opioids. If all works as well as hoped, in a few months you will be able to hurry down the street on your new knee to your neighborhood connection. He will keep you supplied with your daily fix of Oxycodone, Fentanyl, Vicodin, Demerol, Dilaudid, Morphine or whatever street substitute you can get. Better living through pharmacology – except for the side effects which include constipation, bleeding hemorrhoids, membership in a 12-step program, and heart stoppage.

The reason you need the drugs is the screaming pain caused when they get you up on your feet moments after stapling you back together so you don’t’ develop those pesky fatal blood clots. You also have to start exercising the joint fast so it doesn’t seize up or develop scar tissue that will make the knee more useless than before the operation.

With any luck they will soon have you dragging your bleeding, wounded carcass through the germ-laden halls and dump you out into the world where the side effects can be blamed on you, not the medical-industrial complex and its men in white. Defensive medicine begins in the legal department. Of course being forced to walk on an incredibly painful, bloody limb while high on drugs offers a fine opportunity to fall to the ground cracking your head open like a ripe watermelon. Lights out.

And if you survive all this, then come months of whining self-pity that makes your caregiver wish you had died on the table and start considering whether there’s any chance of getting away with slipping you an overdose. And so, on to rehab, a flashback to high school gym class where several devotees of the Marquise de Sade called Coach Bell, Schoeck and Hrivnak delighted in simultaneously causing you physical pain and psychic humiliation. “Is that the best you can do, you little wimp?” “Yes, coach.” “Well then hop in the shower and I’ll stand here and watch.” “No coach.”

When you consider all this horror, it is peculiar that so many bridge players have encouraged me to have the surgery done, saying, “I feel so much better. I wish I’d had it done years earlier.” But they are used to outwitting each other. Their encouragement, I begin to suspect, may be a stratagem called the misery-loves-company finesse. I’m also reasonably sure that the joint replacement patients who didn’t survive would have offered different advice. But they have gone to the great Life Master Sectional Tournament in the sky.

By the time you read this, a nurse will have used a sharpie to draw a target on my left knee to keep the doctor from accidentally dismantling the wrong joint. And I will have written Do Not Resuscitate in blood on my forehead just in case something goes wrong. So long, dear reader, it’s been good to know you.

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