Surgery Stories from the Airport at 5:43 PM

So I figured on writing a couple of posts last night, and posting one of them just after midnight so that it would count for today. I didn’t get around to actually doing that, so I was somewhat concerned that between going to work and leaving for Delaware, I wouldn’t have time to write more than a “Hello, Goodbye” type thing, if I even got to it before midnight tonight. But wait! What should happen when I get the airport in Indianapolis? My flight is delayed for an hour. And so I get to bust out the laptop, put some Jay-Z on my giant headphones, and go to town for a bit. Of course, the wireless connection here is not great, so I may not be able to actually post this for a while, but it’s being written at 3:30. I’m just sayin.

I’d do the thing that Amelia tagged me with, but again, I can’t really get online to see what the questions are and answer them. So that will have to wait until Friday. I’d also finish my basement story, but I can’t remember where I left off. So luckily I have one more story to tell, and it is about a body part. Not the one you’re thinking of, but my knee.

Every year, a bunch of the guys from church get together and play football on Thanksgiving. It’s lots of fun, and so I was looking forward to it this year. Zimm’s brother-in-law Matt and I went to the field by the church on Tuesday night and painted in some end zones and sidelines, so there would be no disputing in/out of bounds or whether or not someone crossed the threshold of the end zone. With Matt as the quarterback and me as the big-time receiver (I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true!), we were ready to go.

Of course, this being Indiana, the day came and the weather was nasty. It snowed the day before, and it continued to rain and be cold that morning. This didn’t faze anyone of course, because everyone knows that football is best played on a sloppy field. So we got going and took a commanding lead (the teams were a bit lopsided in our favor this year, since we played old guys against young guys—young guys being 18 and younger, and with a distinct height disadvantage), and it was our turn to be on defense. I went to drop back into coverage on a routine play, and we just happened to be in the sloppiest part of the field. As I backed up, I slipped in some mud and felt the familiar sensation of my knee buckling as ligaments stretched and slid around. Not the best. So I went down and figured I was done for the day. This wasn’t the first time I’d messed up my knee, which would likely lead one to believe that I wear a knee brace when I play sports (one would be wrong). Usually when it happened (once every couple of years or so), I’d limp around for a little bit, then be fine in a couple of hours. Thinking this was the case at that particular time, I attempted to walk it off for a little while so that I could get back into the game (hey—I don’t get to play football all that often, okay?)

Needless to say, I determined that I could still play after a little while, though I was still limping. The injury worked in my favor game-wise, since no one wanted to cover me, and I could limp out for a few yards, wide open, and catch check-down passes. So we played for a while longer until it was time to go, at which point I called my wife and gave her the story on my knee. She was not pleased, but I played it off, because hey, this kind of thing has happened before.

The first indication that this time was different came when I got home and had a look at my knee. It was roughly eight times the size of my other knee, which had never heretofore been the case. I still wasn’t alarmed, because I figured I had just sprained something, and I could stay off it for a little bit and be okay. Worst case scenario, I’d be fine in a couple of days. Unfortunately for my knee, it wasn’t an option to stay home. We were taking the boys to the children’s museum in Indy the next day, so I was going to have to figure something out with my lame self. (Excuse me for a moment while I get that dirt off my shoulder…thank you.)

We ended up going to the museum as planned, and I used the stroller as a makeshift walker on the way inside. Luckily for me, the museum rented out wheelchairs, so I got to wheel myself around in that for the day. I was hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew (not because it’s embarrassing to be in a wheelchair you understand; I just didn’t want to have to tell the story), and I was fortunate in that way as well. So that was all fine.

Well, a couple more days came and went, and I decided I should probably go get my knee checked out, because it was still rather large, and I couldn’t bend it. I went in and they gave me an X-Ray, which I thought was kind of silly, because of course it wasn’t something with a bone. As expected, the doctor said there was an “effusion” around my knee, which as far as I can tell means “stuff that’s surrounding the knee, making it big”. This was not a news flash. So I got referred to the orthopedic dude in Carmel (a tasty suburb of Indy.) I went there on Friday, figuring I’d get an MRI and they’d figure out what was wrong. Well, I got to the office (about 45 minutes away), signed in, waited for about 15 minutes, got called back to the exam room, took my pants off, waited for another 15 minutes, then saw the doctor. He felt my knee for a few minutes, asked me a couple of questions, and then said, “Okay, I think it’s a torn meniscus. I’m going to send you for an MRI, which you can have done in Kokomo.” At this point I was confused, because I live in Kokomo, and really I already knew I needed an MRI. So I had driven a total of an hour and a half, waited for half an hour, and had the substance of my visit take five minutes all so that I could get sent for something I already knew I’d need. Of course, without that visit, I could hardly have paid my $30 co pay, right?

The MRI was good times. I had just watched the episode of “House” the night before where the magician swallowed a key before he went into the MRI and it got sucked out of his intestines by the magnet, so I made sure not to swallow any foreign (especially metal) objects before I went in. Or at least I made sure they passed through the system beforehand.

What I didn’t realize from all my experiences with MRI machines (again, most of that experience comes from watching “House”) was that they are exceedingly loud. The tech gave me some headphones before the procedure was to start, and she said the radio was broken, so she’d have to put in a CD. She asked if Rascall Flatts was okay. I figured that was just about a small step above listening to an MRI machine for 45 minutes, so I said sure.

If you haven’t had an MRI before, I’ll explain the process. Basically they take whichever part of your body is ailing, stick whichever half of your body encompasses that part in a loud tube for an hour, and tell you to sit completely still for the duration. Luckily for me, the knee is in the lower half of the body, so I didn’t get my head stuck in the tube. That would have made me claustrophobic, and I might have gone crazy having to sit still for that long, or at least turned into the Incredible Hulk. No, I was merely waist-deep in the magnet tube. So seeing as how I was supposed to hold still and I was sleepy, I managed to take a nap, despite the loud high-voicedness that was Rascall Flatts assaulting my eardrums.

It took a few days for the results to come back, and in the meantime I continued to limp around. Zimm said at one point that I looked like Anton Chigurh from “No Country for Old Men” with the way I was lurching and having shaggy hair (I didn’t quite have the bowl-cut-bob of Chigurh, mind you.) The office called with the results eventually and said that the problem was indeed not a torn meniscus, as the doctor had originally theorized, but a piece of broken bone that was floating around in my knee area. She told me that it was a chip from my femoral something-or-other, meaning the top of my femur. This sounded like it should have been quite painful, but in truth I didn’t hurt too badly at all. (This, if you’re wondering, is because I’m a badass.) The problem was simply that I couldn’t really walk well because my knee felt like it was going to buckle. (Which didn’t really fit with the diagnosis until I found out more about muscle and bone structure later on. I will not bore you with this information, but just trust me when I say that it makes sense now.)

So the verdict was that I would need surgery to get the piece of bone out. Shocking, right? I’d never had surgery up to this point, so I was actually kind of excited for the new experience. It was scheduled for a week later in Carmel again.

Before the surgery, I got some material in the mail that told me a little of what to expect. I was supposed to shave me knee and a few inches above and below, and I was also supposed to write “No” on the knee that was not to be sliced. I will say this: shaving legs that have never been shaved before is not the easiest of tasks. I have five blades on my razor, and I needed all of them for about 20 minutes to carve through the forest of knee hair. I wondered at one point if a machete might not do the job better. And I’m not even all that hairy. As for writing on my knee, I figured if I was going to write on it, I might as well go all the way. I took a sharpie and wrote “NO. Please use other knee (the smooth one).” I have a picture, which I’ll post when I get back from Delaware, since I don’t have it on me. They also mentioned that I should have someone drive me to the hospital so that I’d have a ride home afterwards. I thought perhaps I’d be able to drive home, but found that apparently they use this thing in surgery called “anesthetic” that renders one incapable of operating motor vehicles. I wondered if it was like Nyquil.

It was not like Nyquil. I was wheeled into the surgery room, and the anesthesiologist said he was going to give me something to make me relax. I said, “I’m actually pretty relaxed right now.” He said, “No, I mean relaxed.” You know the most disturbing thing about being under for the surgery? There was absolutely no sensation of the passage of time. I woke up and didn’t even know that they had started. Also, I have no recollection of the events that occurred directly after the surgery. According to my wife, however, I was loud, obnoxious, and prone to fits of laughter. Apparently I asked the nurse loudly if the surgeon had seen the knee that I wrote on, and I laughed for a good few minutes when she said she was sure they had seen it. That’s hardly all I said, too. She knows better than I do, and she was lamenting the fact that she didn’t bring the video camera. There was also one point when the nurse was going to take my IV out, and I said, “You should have told me to shave my arm too. This is going to hurt! Oooooh, it’s gonna hurt! Is this gonna hurt? Ohhhhh.” Or something to that effect. I heard all sorts of things that I allegedly did, but I can’t remember what most of them were anymore.

The epilogue to the story is that I’m walking pretty well now, though my knee is still a bit tight. I don’t especially like climbing ladders, but I can do it. I can also go up and down stairs, but I don’t know that I could run right now. Oh—and one more thing. Before the surgery, in between the 45 times they asked me which knee was being operated on (didn’t they read my message?), they told me that the piece of bone was actually from my kneecap. I thought that made a little more sense than the top of my femur, but I still don’t get how it happened. No one even hit my knee. It just buckled. Oh well. Guess I’ll wear a knee brace next year.