Joint Endeavor

Not long ago, I mentioned a "secret project" here. Here's what it was. Monday the 28th at an ungodly early hour, I traded in my old right knee for a brand-new knee. I got a fairly good one I think and for a rather good price: 99 cents at — where else? — the 99 Cents Only Store on Wilshire. I wanted to get my knee at Costco until I found out that they make you buy a dozen.

First question people ask: Did it hurt? Answer: Yes, of course. It hurt like hell. As of today, it only hurts like heck and only when I put weight on it or twist it in an odd way. I trust I will look back on this decision and feel that the result is less total agony than I'd have experienced if I'd kept the old one much longer.

Actually, keeping the old one indefinitely was not a real option. It just plain wore out and it was time for it to go. Would that all things in this world that have outlived their uselessness could be replaced so thoroughly. (Have you watched Meet the Press lately?)

Please understand before I go any further that I am not recommending this surgery to anyone or not not recommending it to anyone; just describing my experiences. Would I do it again? Alas, I may have to as my left knee has been giving me trouble, too — and why not? It's just as old and I got it from the same place. I probably could have delayed the right knee for six months but because it was so intermittently efficient, I stopped driving about three weeks ago. And as I'm sure everyone can understand, I wanted to try and get it replaced and healed before the left knee became an issue.

What did I learn from the experience? Well, one thing is that many narcotics may have zero effect on my body at least for pain management. As you may know and even care, I have taken precious few drugs in my life…and I'm including alcohol and tobacco in that list. Never tried most others either but I'm kinda unsurprised that the ones they tried on me at the hospital didn't all do for me what they do for most folks.

As I've mentioned here, I have a lot of Food Allergies. One thing you learn when you have a lot of them is that bodies are different. This is not something that dawns on most people who either have none or have only had minor bad experiences with one or two foods. They're always saying to folks like me, "Oh, you should eat artichokes! They're so healthy for you!" And some of us think to ourselves, "Healthy for you maybe, poison to me!" You'd be amazed at the number of folks who don't believe that anyone can't eat the things they love. (Sometimes, they'll even say, "What if we melted cheese on the artichoke?")

So since walnuts do not have the same effect on my body as they do on most bodies, I see no reason to assume that any given drug will. Invulnerability to drugs is apparently not a hereditary trait. My mother used to consume Vicodin like those great Molasses Chips bars that come in assortments of See's Candy. The time I took my one and only Vicodin, which was in connection with some minor surgery, I got violently seasick on dry land.

I had my surgery on Monday. After, there was much pain, especially if I did anything foolish like moving my leg or exhaling. They gave me Norco. It had no effect. They gave me a higher dosage of Norco. Still no effect. Then they tried Dilaudid. That did have an effect: It made me nauseous and dizzy. The leg remained indifferent and ablaze.

The Dilaudid experiment was in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning. Once it had failed, doctors were unreachable and my nurse wasn't authorized to give me anything else so I suffered until about 7:30 AM when my surgeon made his rounds to see how I was doing. When he found out, he ordered up a new nerve block for my leg, like the nerve block they'd used along with other anesthetics during the surgery. For reasons they explained but which I'm not sure I can replicate here, the second block wouldn't take so we plunged back into trying other drugs.

Morphine didn't work on me. Percoset didn't work on me. Oxycontin didn't do a thing for my pain but it did make me very, very stupid for most of one night. Finally, I understand this Rush Limbaugh thing.

A few others failed and then on Thursday morning, they called in a Pain Management specialist. A young Korean woman suggested a muscle relaxant called Robaxin which, working in tandem with more conventional pain-killers, suddenly did the trick. By Thursday evening, I could move without sounding like Sam Kinison with his dick stuck in his zipper. Friday morning, I even took a few steps with a walker.

Friday evening, I was moved to a Rehabilitation Center, a move I initially feared. I dealt with several for my mother when she was in her final years and even the best one I found wasn't wonderful. The worst one reminded me of one of those post-apocalyptic movies where the survivors of the nuclear holocaust wonder aloud if those who'd perished weren't the lucky ones. But folks at the hospital assured me I was going to one of the better places and they were right, though I turned out to be allergic to every single thing on their menu except Cheerios.

That amazingly was not a problem since some combo of after-effects of the surgery and/or my pain meds completely nuked my appetite. My friend Carolyn and my cleaning lady Dora brought me the few meals I felt like eating. (The chow in the hospital was, amazingly, not bad. I wasn't hungry there either but what I did consume could have been served at a Denny's or Bob Evans'.)

That was one difference between the hospital and the Rehabilitation Center. Another was that in the hospital, I had a private room and didn't have to listen to a lot of old people screaming all night. I don't mean that to be insensitive but that's an accurate description. I shared a room with two gents far more elderly than I and across the hall from us was a woman I never saw but heard aplenty. From her voice, I imagined her looking just like Shelley Winters and she was always hollering to have her door left open, her door left closed, her food tray brought, her food tray taken away, her medication given, etc. Mainly though, the demands were toilet-related.

So it's 4 AM and we're all listening to this woman announce in graphic terms what she'll do to the bed and herself if someone doesn't come and help her. No wonder I had no appetite. Meanwhile, one of my roommates kept yelling in pain while the other was nice about 23 hours and 55 minutes out of each day. The other five, he'd spend in nightmare-delusion land, yelling at the nurses here that they had broken into his home and they should leave immediately because he was calling the police.

And still, it wasn't that bad. The staff was friendly and efficient. The place was clean and well-equipped. The Physical Therapists knew what they were doing. I did not have a terrible time.

Please do not write me that you or a loved one had a terrible time in a nursing facility. I know that's the norm, especially after what I experienced having to yank my mother out of several. I just thought you'd all appreciate hearing that it isn't always that way.

Since the wonderful Korean Pain Specialist solved the riddle of what would manage my hurting, my knee has gotten a bit better each day. I came home this afternoon and finished/uploaded this post which I mostly drafted at the Rehab Center. The four days at the hospital, I managed this blog, posting pre-written items and writing some new ones on my iPad and iPhone. At the Rehab Center, I had the space (and ability to get outta bed) so I could set up the laptop. Now I'm home and I expect to be back to normal walking and driving in two weeks, maybe sooner.

I did not mention this before now except to a few good friends, or keep a real-time blog of the experience because I knew I'd get e-mails with anecdotal tales of folks whose knee replacements went horribly, horribly wrong. For some reason, some people think they're being helpful when they do that while others do it out of a heightened sense of Nasty. Even after my Gastric Bypass Surgery in 2006 which was utterly successful, one of my fellow comic book writers couldn't resist coming up to me at Comic-Con and telling me, "You know, most people who have that operation are okay for a time but then they suddenly die." He was not kidding. He just wanted to piss on someone else's self-improvement.

That's everything I can think of to tell you right now but others, I'm sure, will occur to me. It was briefly awful but all in all, less awful than I expected. Once I'm well enough to get down on one knee, I'll start working up a dynamite Jolson impression to go with my Durante.