Are They Moving? How About Now?

The time in the hospital for my hip surgery was okay.  Because I couldn't put any weight on them, I was given a transfer board, which is pretty much just a wooden board that's about a foot long.  I had to use it to get from the bed to my wheelchair, or from my wheelchair to the toilet, etc.  I couldn't put any weight whatsoever on my hips.  It was pretty hard.  My arms aren't giant pipes by any stretch of the imagination, so I got tired pretty easily.
The feeling in my limbs took forever to come back.  They slowed the flow of the epidural to try to give me some back.  It's super awkward trying to figure out if the feeling is coming back by wiggling my toes.  It's like trying to wiggle your ears when you don't know what it feels like.  You have to think "wiggletoeswiggletoeswiggletoes" and then ask someone if they moved.  They didn't want to just yank the thing out of my back because then it'd get the worse pins and needles feeling ever, and the pain of the surgery would hit me like a truck.  So we eased into it.  I was super excited once it finally came all the way back.

This time my roommate was an 18 year old girl named Ashley.  She had something quite bad.  Her side of the room was papered with posters and teddy bears, and she could do a lot of the stuff by herself without the nurses help, not because she wasn't that bad but because she was used to it.  She was really nice, and it's another case where I feel much worse for her than I ever will feel about myself.  I really hope she managed to get out of there and got to start her life.

This time I had a nurse name Julie.  She was sooo nice.  We chatted and stuff, she was really attentive.  Sometimes you get nurses that care so much that you think they should be the role model of all nurses in the world, and Julie was definitely one of them.

The fourth day in, I got moved to a four person room because they needed our room for an isolation.  Ashley had to take all her stuff down and pack up so she could put it up in whichever room she was in next.  My parents asked if she wanted help, but she said she was used to it, so she did it on her own.  They wheeled me into my new room and I transferred onto my new bed.  Being in a four person room is completely different from a two person room; it's more like waking up in the recovery room, but then having to stay there and sleep there.  The kids around me were a lot younger, so I needed to have lights out pretty early and got a pretty sucky sleep.  The next day I got to meet a physiotherapist, who taught me a little more of the transfer board and made sure I could actually transfer myself and move myself in a wheelchair well.  Then I was allowed to go!  I got the IV ripped out of me, and we rolled our way to the front of the building where dad had pulled the car around.

Getting into the Opaz was a little difficult, but the seats are pretty worn in and low, so it wasn't ridiculously hard.  I found it difficult to sit in the car though, because my hips were still extremely sore and I hadn't ever sat up for that long a time.  We did it though, returned the chair (mine was at home), and drove off.  It was a pretty rough ride for me, but no where near as rough as the brain surgery.  Once we got home, we took out my chair, I transferred into it, we rolled me up the ramp and into the house, and then tucked me in to my guest room bed.  Then I went to sleep.

Are My Knees Bent? Cause It Kinda Feels Like They're Bent. No? Okay, My Bad.

Leading up to the hip surgeries, we had a lot of preparing to do.  I would be wheelchair bound for a little while, so we needed to get some sort of lever/pulley system rigged up to get me out of the house.  Just kidding, we just used a ramp.  However, getting ramps for people in wheelchairs is harder than it sounds.  We got this woman to come in and measure whether or not a ramp would work in our house.  Apparently you need to have a certain ratio of height vs. distance (or slope, for people who are a little quicker than me) and our house definitely doesn't have that.  We were like 'oh no, guess I won't be able to leave the house, thanks for you help' until she left.  Then we went out and rented some metal ramps and set them up ourselves.  My dad, being dad, constructed a wooden box that we put in the middle of the garage to use as an intermediate level so that I didn't just go flying down the ramp and plummet head first into the floor.  They then put the two pairs of ramps on it so that it was just wide enough to fit my chair.  It was pretty awesome, and I kind of wish we got a picture of them (and a picture of Kyle when he tripped over them on the way to get a beer, because that was hilarious).  Anyway, good work Dad.  We also rented a wheelchair for me, and bought some crutches.

The next step was more complicated. I had to move from my room upstairs to the dining room/Mom's office/part time guest room.  The bed was already down there, but they pushed it against a wall and put a TV in so I wouldn't be lonely.  Then they put all my sheets on it, and my teddy bear, then shoved me in and locked the door.  No, they didn't, but it kind of felt like I wasn't ever going upstairs again so they may as well have.  We were now all pumped and ready to go.

On the big day, Mom, Dad, and I walked into the Children's and went upstairs to the Day Surgery unit.  Once again we went through the questions, and we sat down to play some crib.  And we waited.  And waited.  I wasn't even allowed to chew gum, and I was extremely hungry.  The waiting room slowly cleared out; the young kids always go first for surgeries because they can't handle the hunger and stuff as well.  After a little while, we found out that some kid was carsurfing and came in for emergency surgery.  Once he was done getting fixed, it was our turn.  So we sat and waited, and got angrier and angrier.  Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for the kid.  The truth is, he shouldn't have been carsurfing.  I was super upset because I didn't ask for what I was there for, and I had to sit on hungry pins and needles because he decided to throw caution to the wind and failed.  I stick by this thought, as mean as it is and as bad as I feel about it.  Anyway, the situation was worse than we'd figured (or the doctors, for that matter) because around 6, when I was the last one waiting in the room, my surgeon came in.  He was working on this boy too, and it looked like he wasn't going to make it.  My surgeon was still in weirdly high spirits though, and when we asked him why he told us that the rods that were going in my hips were actually flown in from Ontario.  He'd never done this surgery before and he was all excited about it.  I remember my Mom saying "I hope you have an instruction manual!" and him laughing, and then her saying "no, really.  Make sure you have an instruction manual."

Anyway, because of that kid, I got pushed to getting surgery three days later, on the following Monday.  On the bright side, I would get to bypass the waiting room stuff because I was getting admitted to the hospital the night before.  The weekend went by relatively fast, and on Sunday night I checked in for another night in Hotel Children's.  It was weird walking in and feeling relatively healthy, yet still having to climb into the hospital bed and get my vitals checked.  My boyfriend came and saw me while we were there, so him and I went for a walk around the hospital a bit.  After a while, he left and my parents left and I was ready for lights out at 7pm.  Okay, maybe not that early, but being a children's hospital, you can't really have a party in one of the rooms because there's kids sleeping next door.  I spent the night reading and trying to not panic about the next day.  I slept pretty well, especially considering my sleeps before later surgeries.  That seems to be something that gets worse with age.

The next morning, my parents were there again.  They told me they loved me and all that jazz.  A nurse came to get me, and together we walked to the back elevator that they take the beds down in.  I wasn't allowed to wear my glasses, so everything is a little foggy (ha).  I said bye to my parents, and walked with the woman to the operating room.  I climbed up on this tiny freaking bed and was positive I was going to teeter off the edge.  I got gas again, which is always fun, and off we went.



When I woke up in recovery, a nurse asked me if I was going to get sick.  I said 'yep', half leaned up, said 'nope', and laid back down.  I was freezing.  They put this blanket on me and filled it with hot air, it was actually pretty awesome.  They asked if I was doing okay and I said yes, and then asked one of the nurses if my knees were bent.  She kind of gave me a weird look and said 'no.' and I said 'ok, cool, thanks.'  I couldn't feel my legs.  I was positive that I was actually now paralyzed from my waist down.  I accepted this as truth without asking anyone, and spent the rest of recovery planning out my new wheelchair-bound life.  Then they towed me back to my room.  This is where the nurses informed my family that I had an epidural in, which no one had warned me about before.  I couldn't even wiggle my toes or feel anyone touching my legs.  Kinda freaky when you don't know why.  The bandages I had on felt massive when I touched them, but I found out after they were only about a half centimeter thick.

I did way better with this surgery as far as nausea went; I didn't throw up once.  The only problem was that shortly after I woke up, I decided it was a good idea to have some licorice.  I love red licorice, but I still had the taste of the anaesthetic in my mouth, so that's what it tasted like.  It took me a while before I could eat it and not taste that.

The doctor came and told us the surgery was a success, as far as we could tell.  The rods went in and I didn't die, so I guess that's really all I could ask for at the time.  We wouldn't know if the rods managed to revascularize the joints for a while, so we were to just play the waiting game and focus on healing.

If You Can't Handle The Heat, Run Away And Get Someone Who Can

The hardest part of getting the bone disease at the time was that I wasn't able to see Kyle graduate.  My grandparents came in and had to stay home with me while my parents went and watched him graduate.  I know that they had wanted to see him graduate as well, so I felt like a giant douche sitting there asking them to get me drinks while they were missing out on their first grandchild's big day.  Before they left, Kyle gave me a hug and said "Don't worry, high school graduation doesn't matter.  It's the University graduation that's important, and you can see that."  I cried when he said it, and I'm tearing up now as I write it.  It takes an amazing person to play down something so big because they know how much it means to another person that can't see it.  Once they left, my grandpa handed me the remote and told me to turn it to whatever, and my nana sat in the other chair and started reading.  Every so often, they'd ask how I was doing, if I needed anything, if I was okay, and they'd always make sure I didn't have to get up.  They're really great, and it's nice to know that if we need them they're there.  I have an awesome family.

At this point it was still extremely hard to walk.  It took a long time for my pain tolerance to go up, and even longer for my knees to stop hurting so much.  Mentally I got used of it, and I accepted the fact that I was going to have this for the rest of my life.  I knew I had to keep fighting, because I had so much in life that I wanted to do, and I couldn't let something, even something as serious as this, hold me back.  Life goes on, and if you focus on what you're missing, you don't go with it.

The appointment with the orthopedic surgeon came pretty quickly.  We came into the waiting room, a solid 30ft from the neurosurgery waiting room, and we sat down for a long wait.  I'm pretty sure this was the time that we found all the magazines for university, colleges, etc. in the waiting room.  I'd wanted to be an engineer since grade 8.  We went through them half-heartedly, mostly wasting time (though it was good I did, because it helped me out later in the story).  Finally it was our turn.  We went into the examination room, and I climbed up on my throne.  I'd gotten an MRI at some point in between then and here, so my images were up on the screen.  A woman doctor came in and introduced herself, then looked at the screen.  Then she goes "Oh.  Oh my god.  This isn't good.  This really isn't good."  She looked at us and said "this isn't good."  We all just looked back at her with a look on our faces like 'thanks, tips.'  She turned and went running out of the room.  We all looked at each other, a little surprised at this.  I'm not really used of people running from me.

A few minutes later, in walks a man orthopedic surgeon.  Apparently the woman before got super intimidated by my awesome bones and got someone else to come and look after them.  He was a lot more positive about everything, and didn't make me feel at all like an alien just jumped out of my MRI.  He started telling us (really excitedly) about this surgery that we could do, where we put tantalum rods in my hips in an attempt to stimulate the blood flow to the head of the joint.  They hadn't done it in western Canada yet, but they did in Ontario an so far they'd had good results.  We were pretty skeptical, and justifiably hesitant.  He was really pushing for it, not because he wanted to do it, but because he really thought it would help.  We said we'd think about it.

We had an appointment with my neurosurgeon a little bit later.  While we were in the appointment, the orthopedic surgeon knocks and comes in.  He told the neurosurgeon about what he wanted to do, and together they tried to persuade us. Then he told us that he was going to make an appointment for us with a really well known orthopedic surgeon in Foothills to get his opinion on the situation.  We agreed to go, mostly because the whole thing was hilarious.  We accepted and got an appointment with the guy.



Because of all this, we decided that we would indeed to ahead with the surgery.  It got booked for February of 2005, the last semester of grade 12.  At this point, I still had the headache.