My Hip Replacements - How I felt before the first surgery.

It's been over 5 years since I lost the ability to walk. I've had to use two canes, crutches, or a walker to walk beyond a few baby steps for so long that I now equate the act of walking with flying. When I watch movies I don't wow at the explosive kung fu action, I'm watching in amazement that people are walking without canes. How do they keep from tipping over? I especially watch people who are obviously much older than me and that really makes me ooo and ahhh.

If I have an errand to run, forgetting something critical, once I've navigated my way into the seat of the van is devastating. Something that could almost make me break down. It is so hard and painful to do this simple thing, the thought of getting out of the van, going back up the stairs, into the building, and starting all over again is like pulling your homemade lasagne out of the oven, burning your fingers and dropping the whole roll on your bare foot, hard enough to shatter the Pyrex baking pan.

Every Christmas, for the past several years, I've joked that I was Tiny Tim, not the folk lore singer of Laugh-In fame, but the little crippled kid in the Christmas Carol. “All I want for Christmas in to be able to walk.” It has been very frustrating knowing I could be fixed but not able to do anything about it. To be grinding my bones together day in and out, because I didn't want to give up on my passion with the restaurant. I knew it would take an incredible amount of money to reopen after a long closing and that was something I didn't have. Closing meant, CLOSING. But once I got down to only being able to open three and a half days a week and I was in worse pain than ever, basically at work or in bed, it was time to call it a day.

I was so frustrated with my life back in 2011 that I felt compelled to make the whitest rap video in history.

 

This is the highest resolution I can upload here. You can watch it full size on my Youtube channel: My52Pickup

Every time I think about the upcoming surgery, It's like I was hit in the head with a baseball bat, dead center on the forehead. But it doesn't cause the pain, only the disorientation that goes along with someone smacking you with all their might. For so long, it's been something that was in the distant unknown future in a Galaxy far, fat, away. I had started to believe it would never happen.

I tried talking to some of my friends about the surgery, but can't. Any time I broach the subject, a story, instantly pops up, about someone's centennial grandmother. Who, after having surgery, got up, drove home, stopped at the store on the way to pick up T-bones for dinner. Then at home picked the vegetables from her organic garden to complete the meal, but not before weeding all the outside rows and edges. Then the next morning after she finished teaching her Taekwondo class, to 30 eighth graders with ADHD, she went for a 15 mile march, through the woods, over rough terrain, with a backpack loaded with a camp stove and all the fixings, to make her grand mother's dinner. Because her mother's getting to old to cook her own lost children and she needs a little help.

I know people mean well and are trying to reassure me. But it puts a lot of pressure on me to, as the Russian's saying goes, “Don't be a wimp.” Well they actually they say pussy, but I'm too much of a wimp to say that.

My point is that this is a wildly transitional event in my life that will effect me like no other single event ever has other than being born in the first place. I tell myself I'll be able to walk, but there's a part of me that doesn't believe it, so I won't be completely crushed if it doesn't happen. I'm meditating a lot, trying to keep my head clear, trying not to freak, and taking life as it comes. It's so unknown, I feel like I'm stepping off into space.  

  Geronimo!