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Taking the Game into Overtime

I have just had my second hip joint replacement:  it is part of my desire to live a balanced life;  pain on both sides.

After looking at images of the contraptions they concoct to replace the contraptions I was born with, I am impressed with how much they look like bathtub handles or shower heads.  And now the upper parts of me are joined to my legs, on both sides, with bolts and bottle caps!

Sawed apart last Wednesday, the doctor taped and stapled me back together, more or less in the shape of a biped-without-feathers, with orders to pretend everything was OK, and that someday he would take the bandages and staples off and out, and see what he and god had wrought from what they had to work with.

While we were still in Minnesota, I had my right hip replaced with plastic and titanium.  I had asked the doctor's assistant how they were going to operate, fumbling for terms I did not know, and she more-or-less snorted that they would be "coming in from the side".  She did not know anything about a frontal attack on hip joints.  When we returned to Tucson, I attended a promotional lecture about hip replacements, because it was already evident that I had two hips, and neither of them was going to last until kingdom come, and I learned about posterior, lateral, and anterior attacks on hip joints.  This latest operation was anterior, and I scarcely can believe the difference!

After the Minnesota doctor's carpentry and plumbing team had attacked me from the side, I felt as if they had not just sawn off and bored out worn bones, but that they had run everything through a meat grinder to make it easier to put all the evidence back in place.  It was a long, really uncomfortable experience.

This time, knocking me unconscious first so that I would not see them coming, and flinch, they divided me with a frontal attack.  I was up the same day, and home the next.  I used a walker for about three days, and a cane for one.  I carried the cane about on the fifth day, just in case, and then hung it up.  It is not that I am dancing, or taking ground balls, but I am astonished, knowing that another part of me is now metal and plastic, without great trauma.

I still make creaking, barn door noises, but that comes from other, older original parts that I will likely have to tolerate until the wind takes them off, and the breezes go straight through.

There is something really nice about being eighty-four, and watching doctors mess about with my parts, knowing that even if they don't get it right, or can't, that I am eighty-four and already playing in extra innings.

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