Back at the beginning of July it was road trip time!
The 5 hour drive north wasn’t bad, I was a little surprised how good I felt through the entire ride, especially considering I was just over 6 weeks post-op for my second hip replacement.
Flashback to Another Time
This drive north always gives me flashbacks to one year (2015) when we started the trip following a rainy rugby game. I can still feel the pain, somethings will never leave my memory. (It actually makes me want to cry as I type this.) I remember how painful that ride was, even while being able to re-position in the passenger seat and stretch out (if you have arthritis you know that doesn’t help!).
The rugby game itself also still stands out in my mind as I was a peg leg most of the time. If you don’t know what I mean by peg leg that’s when your one leg (my right at the time) would basically stop working and you just throw my leg forward from the hip area to try to move it. It’s actually a little easier to do this when you’re trying to move faster (which isn’t really fast at all in reality). So I looked like a running pirate. This sometimes happened to me later in games (almost always afterwards) but it was a very wet day and that made things much, MUCH worse from the very beginning. I was in so much pain.
And then I hoped into a car for 5-6 hours. Not that going home and laying down would have drastically changed my pain levels and mobility. It took me several days to recover from that game and car ride (this was a year before I learned I needed hip replacements) and that will live in my memory forever.
It’s flashbacks like that that I try to look at through the lens of appreciation. I appreciate where I am now, that I have had the opportunities to become pain free and mobile again.
My New Hip Long-Weekend
It was a weekend of firsts! This was the first time I went swimming, the first time I stood up in a shower and the first time I went on a hike (a very short hike but none the less).
The first two days went very well. I could feel myself get very noticeably stronger. Lots of walking, stairs and daily physio exercises (people were impressed with my dedication while drinking Caesars). Come the third/fourth day I started to get very sore and tight/stiff. I was losing some of the progress that I felt I had gained over the previous days since arriving up north. Prior to this there were a few moments when I had actually forgotten that I was still in recovery mode. Just relaxing I felt no pain, no limitations and a glimpse into what the future could/would be like. It brought a feeling of joy and peace of mind of the potential that the future had. BUT… I had pushed myself a little too hard and was feeling the consequence of that.
All recoveries have it’s ups and downs. Try to keep that in mind when a set back feels like a failure, it’s not. Recovery is a process, not a straight forward guarantee.