We all have our ways of recovering from illness or injury.  Typically, mine is the “hide in my cave” method.  I go home, ignore everyone, don’t answer the phone; David is the only person allowed to see me in my misery. After a few days I emerge and deal with the rest of the world.  That’s my “normal” way of doing it. However, this time was a bit different.

I had 60 hours of hospital time post-op and that time was filled with smiling nurses and nurse assistants.  Little did I know that there was a sign posted outside of each patient’s door saying “start your smile before you enter the room!” I just thought that the Ortho surgery ward was the friendliest bunch of people in the US.  Since there was also a sign at the foot of my bed saying “call, don’t fall” telling the patient to never get up without assistance, I was quickly brainwashed into calling the smiling, helpful, nursing staff each time I needed to void, brush my teeth, or contemplate the shower.  After all, I really didn’t want those nice nurses to get in trouble should I fall, right?

Luckily for me (and Mahdee) the hospital physical therapist assigned to me had a boating past.  Compared to my boating experiences, his were a bit wild–lots of fishing boat time, big seas, hurricanes and scary stuff of the sort that all male boaters seem to like to talk about.  Knowing I wanted to get back to Mahdee quickly, we went over the specific challenges of life aboard that I needed to learn how to deal with quickly: the hospital pre-op phamplet says your stairs shouldn’t have more than a 5″ rise (never mind that US building code is 7″…) and I knew that I’d be scaling 16″ to 19″ distances to rubrail, caprail, and from sole to seat on the way in-and-out of the cockpit.  Nice fellow, he helped me figure out how to do this as well as how to best kneel and retrieve myself from a kneeling position since I knew I’d need that one, too.  In addition to the normal learn-to-clunk-your-way-around-the-hospital-ward-with-the-walker and the special lesson of “how to abuse your walker going up and down stairs safely” I got the extra-special “everything you ever wanted to know about how to climb tall things you shouldn’t climb directly following hip surgery but were afraid to ask.”

So, Friday morning after my last round with the PT fellow, we came home to the boat.  I was already in my “cave” mindset thinking about my comfy bed in the darkened stateroom.  Ah, but I’d forgotten how much I love being in Mahdee’s sunny cockpit.  Before my surgery, we’d placed the boat on the public dock with a wonderful view, from the cockpit, of the channel behind Shelter Island.  I couldn’t resist sitting outside and enjoying the mild weather.

Further drawing me out of the cave were two neighboring boats:  our nearest neighbor sharing the finger pier were Pat and Ali and their daughter Ouest.  We’d emailed back and forth with them for a couple years and it just so happened that they were passing through San Diego right at that moment and just so happened to take the slip next to us.  Ouest was good entertainment as she jabbered, pointed, and climbed about on their boat.  Pat, Ali and Ouest kept me company in our cockpit for a while Friday afternoon while David went to the pharmacy to get yet more drugs for me.  The other neighboring boat of consequence belonged to Mark and Jackie, sailing friends of ours who have been in Mexico for almost two years.  They showed up while I was in surgery and stayed on the public dock during our stay there as well.  Jackie and her teenage daughter Amanda entertained me off and on during my first couple days on the boat as well.  It was so nice to have these boats nearby and their crews keeping my mind away from pains and onto more fun things.  Saturday morning, Pete, another boater we know, arrived in his 54′ power boat and parked between us, Mark & Jackie.  At first I was disappointed–I couldn’t call over to Jackie with words of encouragement or teasing as she and Mark worked on scraping and re-doing their varnish which had been baked in the tropical sun of Mexico.  Shortly I was happy to have cheerful, downright jolly Pete next-door.  He has a good stereo and in the past we’ve enjoyed quiet anchorages with Pete’s stereo playing tasteful classical fare;  On his arrival, he put on what he calls his “Irish pirate music” which I enjoyed greatly; then he played a bit of this-and-that upon my request, humoring me and making me further forget that I don’t feel that great. Over the weekend we had a couple more visits from boaters and lots of strong encouragement from the public dock staff as they saw me clunking along with the walker up the dock ramp.

I never really did make it into my solitary cave.  I regressed into sleeping most of a couple days towards the end of last week–I think I’d overdone it a bit with all my walking about.  We sit at anchor now with a couple familiar boats nearby.  A friendly visit or two from boaters who don’t seem to mind that I’m in my PJ’s; David is working on my galley–installing sink and counter adjacent the stove with me watching from the bed or saloon seating–and overall this is ending up to be a very “different” kind of recovery for me.  Yes, my thigh muscles really hurt, I’m really pretty brain-dead, and the steps are very high and it’s really a bit much to be climbing on and off the boat, but overall, life is good.

The last few months have been full of can’t spell and can’t pronounce words for me.  The swing down into illiteracy comes from a diagnosis this winter of acetabular dysplasia.  It’s a condition that ballerinas and large dogs manage to get.  Since I am neither a ballet dancer nor canine, I just don’t understand how it could be me that is tagged with this hard to spell/hard to say bone condition.

It’s  been bugging me for much of my life but sadly, with our crazy health-care system, each attempt, post-adolescence, I’ve made to obtain a diagnosis has ended in “oh, you don’t need an x-ray, just “blank””  we fill in the blank with “take it easy”, “lose weight”, “do physical therapy to strengthen muscles” and so forth.  Finally in January, after 4 months of killer pain which has been making it impossible for me to even do a good job sailing, and 3 months of trying to get an appointment with my doctor in Maryland, I called my HMO office and said “I’m going to be there camped on your doorstep from January 19-26.  You WILL do an x-ray of my hip.  I will pay for it out-of-pocket if I have to, but you WILL do it.  And, indeed, they did the x-ray and found a severe case of developmental dysplasia.

The x-ray tech said “well, this will give you something to talk to your doctor about!” The x-ray was one day, the Dr. appointment the following.  She walked in the room, said “there’s nothing you can do–no PT, no lifestyle change, no weight loss, nothing…you need surgery…here’s a consult to a surgeon.” and accusingly “I don’t how you could have lived this long without KNOWING there was something seriously wrong with your pelvis.”

Let’s not go there.

After staying in So. Cal thinking we’d have it fixed any week and could then sail North…5 months of trying to get it sorted out and fixed have come and gone.  This included several visits to surgeons and talks on the phone to my insurance company and a change in insurance region to cut down the paperwork, I had a total hip replacement surgery on Tuesday June 14th and went home in the morning of Friday June 17th. Ahh….my hip feels better.  Though I must admit my muscles feel awful, David has to help me get into bed (I can stumble out on my own); we’re on a dock rather than at anchor, and I’m clunking about the pier with a walker.  I’ve got another week or so of giving myself shots in the tummy of the blood thinner Lovenox, I’ve got a huge prescription of Vicodin for pain.  Pills I keep forgetting to take until I’m wincing and sniffling from the pain, silly me.  I have a follow up visit with the surgeon tomorrow, should have stitches out next week and have 20 visits of PT to do between now and August 1st.  Then, with the surgeon’s blessing, we should be sailing up the coast to San Francisco Bay.  Yea!

For all of you who didn’t know about this health issue, sorry not to share before.  I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it while it was all still so open ended without a fix in sight!

Now, back to that wrinkled varnish….I tried hard to get it done before going into surgery, but that seems to have been a total waste of effort.

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