Donuts vs. doctors
I forget sometimes that I am old.
Wandering through the posts on Facebook, I see picture of people who wear, as Billy Joel says, “An old man’s (or woman’s) clothes,” and it catches me up to remember that I look just like them.
Many times I don’t look just like them because they are smiling and a smile is a difficult thing for me … on too many days. A failed hip replacement and its fall out has provided me with a backdrop of pain and perhaps, if not depression, something like it. I try hard to get over or past these experiences, but I have had mixed success.
Walking is awkward and painful. Going up and down stairs is awkward, painful and frightening. I’ve tried to explain to the ortho doc that beyond the less-than-salubrious outcome to my two -count ’em – two right hip replacements, the limp, the pain, the lack of sleep … all of these “outcomes” have separated me from what I know about how to live my life. From the simplest tasks that involve mobility to more long-term commitments that would involve my energy and attention, nothing is the same.
Doctors have no nostrums that adequately address the problem. Shrugged shoulders and a wait-and-see attitude has led me to think that there are no remedies or that I am not worth the time to find them. Typing this, I can see that this is not one of the good days. I’m sure that my doctors are doing the best they can. At least some of them are. Others, not so much.
I am not asking, “Why me?” There are so many who are facing challenges that make my complaint seem like a hangnail. And, yes, there is a modicum of hubris involved, maybe more than a modicum. I do resent spending thousands of dollars on doctors and treatments in search of regaining what I have lost. So, add resentment to the list. And, if I am very truthful, my “whatever this is” has a lot of anger in it, anger that I have to change when that is not what I planned. Pride, vanity (for very modest accomplishments), self-importance, again for simple competencies that have taken me a lifetime to accumulate are being diminished by my need to seek help. I know that there is something wrong with this, but it is part of that forced and unexpected separation from that which I know and that with which I am familiar.
It is difficult to acknowledge that you need help. Kind of like holding your hand in an L shape on your forehead. Loser. Old loser.
There is a phrase that comes to mind. “Your own worst enemy.”
I am becoming, if I am not already, a “victim.”
Victims are the result of someone else’s misadventure. Seeking an answer to the who, what or why does little to alleviate the funk that I am trying to dispel. It is what it is.
And there it is. I do have lots of problems that stem from my last hip replacement, but I am letting them redefine who I am. It’s better that I do the redefining, but my attempts at redefinition have not been something that will win a prize.
Seeking to assuage the anxiety and gloom that enveloped me, I reached for cream-filled, chocolate-covered donuts and their equivalents. Donuts and cupcakes and pies and rich, carbohydrate-filled meals did make me feel … better? Maybe the more apt word is “numb,” which is appropriate, if only for a brief time. Add weight gain to the laundry list of symptoms of my personal misery.
Last week I thought about researching the best vanilla ice cream in the county. Talk about being stuck in a rut!
I’ve established the fact that I have retained my ability to eat sweets. It’s amazing how fast you can replace weight lost during a month’s stay in the hospital and then add even more weight.
I can drive the car and shop and get to the library and the houses of friends, whom I haven’t seen much of in the last year and a half. I can still use my computer, still keep my home and gardens in some kind of order … with help. I can work harder at PT, strengthening the muscles that work in the ways they should. I can and have collected a rather colorful lexicon of expletives to be used carefully when I reach an impasse. I can care … about so many things beside myself. Living with me has got to be a royal pain.
I’m working through this, hitting bumps along the way and, on some days, not really knowing where it is that I want to be other than not the way I am.
I am the proverbial work in progress. But, if you see me near the donut case in Nojaims … remind me that donuts are a delicious but very bad solution.
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
