Episode 44 - Back To Recording In My Office And Lessons Learned From My Fall And Surgery

I’m recording this new episode of Mind and Desire after a bit of a hiatus here inmy office, where I haven’t been able to be and work for not quite a month, but pretty close to it. As I think all of you know, I had a pretty nasty slip and fall on our hardwood floor in our condo which resulted in me landing just right in order to shatter my hip. As it actually turned out I shattered the head of my femur and a good bit of the bone. So I had to have what’s called emergency hip replacement.As my surgeon explained to me: This is not your dad or your grandpa’s hip replacement, where they have arthritis and it’s getting bad, and they come in and they get it handled in one or two hours. My operation actually took four hours. And because of the trauma of the fall and then trying to get up afterwards, which was not a great idea, and all of the other things that went with it, there’s a lot more pain and damage, a lot more recovery that has to take place. So the “emergency” is really the key term there.But I have been on the mend since the operation, as I’ve written about, it is something that takes a lot of time, because there’s many different steps that you have to go through to fix things. But I’m here for the first time back in my office. And this is you could say a baby step for actually doing things. This is probably the easiest location to get to. I can be dropped off right at the front door. There’s a lift that I can take, and I can get around on my cane to the elevator and then up to the fifth floor where my office is, and over to my office, unlock the door, come in here, sit down at this desk in front of the microphone, and communicate with all of you so that’s pretty good nowI’m going to talk in this one, not so much about philosophy, but about some of the things that I’ve learned through this experience. And I’ve already mentioned one of them. Emergency hip replacement is on a whole different level than ordinary hip replacement as far as the toll that it takes on your body and the recovery that it requires.I’ve done a bit of writing in Substack about some of the lessons that I’ve learned, but I haven’t actually gone through all of them. So I’ll just mention a few of them that I have already written about in those three articles so far.One of them is that weird freak stuff happens, and there isn’t really any deeper causality to it. I suppose if you think of the universe as being providentially organized and ordained by some higher mind, maybe you could think that there was some overarching reason for me to have a accident of this sort and undergo this experience. You know, maybe I was getting too big for my britches, or it’s to teach me the value of suffering, or something like that.But if you don’t buy into that, then it’s pretty easy to say, or it should be easy to say rather, that sometimes random stuff happens. I landed on my hip in such a way that it shattered that hip joint. The physician at the emergency room, because we went there, at first was very skeptical. He was like: You’re 55. What, you think you broke your hip? And then he moved my leg and he was like: Oh, maybe we need to do an x-ray. And when he came back from the x-ray, he had a very different attitude and facial expression. And he said something along the lines of: Oh yeah, you really broke that hip.So that sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen to healthy 55-year-olds. A lot of people were searching for the big why of it. Maybe my bones are brittle, so I had to meet with a bone specialist. They asked questions like: Are you safe at home? But really, when it comes down to it, sometimes the stars just align in weird ways. So that’s one important lesson, that we don’t always have to ask for deeper Why’s. And it might be good for us at some point to close that off.Another one was that as somebody who has been suffering from chronic pain in one form or another for decades, and I’m not recommending this, by the way, but it does have a sort of helpful effect. If I was somebody who didn’t experience a lot of routine pain, probably the pain much more intense that I was feeling, because of the fall and break and then the surgery and the recovery, would have gotten to me a lot more. But I’m kind of used to it.So when I was asked, you know, what would I like my pain level to be by one of the nurses, I actually settled on a four. Because to me that seemed just fine and reasonable, because some days I may actually be at a four when I’m normally healthy, and getting around, and getting on with life. Nobody should be in pain ideally, but sometimes having been in pain can be helpful for you.And the third thing that I actually wrote about quite recently had to do with people wishing me a speedy or quick recovery. I said: OK, I understand the sentiment behind it, but it kind of misfires. Because what you really want with this sort of thing is definitely not quick recovery. And to want it to be quick is kind of off base. What you want is all of the little things that have to connect with each other, and cumulatively build you back to a state of health, to be going along and happening as they should.So day-to-day work, doing the PT exercises that you don’t really want to do, every one of them matters. Walking around on it, exercising, eating right, taking care of the pain by getting ahead of it with the painkillers. All of those sorts of things have to do with the healing and none of them are or should be quick.Now, what other lessons have I learned? Well, I’ll give you a hint about one that I’m going to be writing about soon. So they went in for the surgery through my thigh, the front of my thigh, the quadriceps. And that’s where I’ve had a good bit of the pain.And they made a pretty sizable incision. Fortunately, these days they can make them a good bit smaller than they used to in the past, where they’d cut you wide open. But it was still pretty big and they stitched it up with sutures and that’s exactly the way it should be. And it doesn’t look very attractive as these things I imagine never do.So I was looking at it and we’d look at it every single day after we took the big bandage off, because it had to be kept clean and kind of monitored, all of those sorts of things. And you could see it, it was all puckered up and elevated and, you know, there was red blotchy stuff around it. And you could see it slowly getting better.When I went to the surgeon this week... They took the sutures out. And interestingly, when they did that, of course, there’s a little bit of bleeding until they put a bandage on it. When we took the bandage off, I discovered that all of that bunched up ugly skin is now straightened out. And I do have this long line that’s going to be quite a big scar. It doesn’t look great, and it probably never will look great. As a matter of fact, as a side note, when I went in to the ER and they had me get into a gown, so I took off my shirt, they saw the four incision scars from when I had my gallbladder out, and they did that laparoscopically. And they asked, did somebody stab you at one point? And I was like, no, no, it’s just an operational scar.So I’m at the point where I don’t worry too much about attractiveness and all of those sorts of things that I used to be, maybe we could say, obsessed with, in my younger years. And I’m happy. actually, to have these various scars, not because they’re things to show off or anything, but anytime that I look at them, I can remind myself of what it is that I went through. And so I think having a certain kind of attitude towards what happens to our body and what makes it seem less attractive, more ugly in certain respects, can be quite helpful.And I’ll have to think about what other lessons I’ve learned. Those are the biggest ones so far. I could sit down and perhaps plot them out and determine for myself what all the other lessons are. You’ll probably see me doing that in subsequent writings. But that’s probably a good place to leave off here so this doesn’t get overly long.I did want to get back to recording these Mind & Desire podcast episodes. And so it actually fills me with some joy and I would say rightful pride that I’m able to be here once again in the office recording it, even if it’s just a short break, while that I’m here as opposed to spending all day in my office like a workaholic. So that is where I’m going to leave off and you can expect more reflections to come down the line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe