I KNEE-ded That

Well I am on the other side of knee surgery now and feeling super!  It should be no surprise now how quickly things can turn around.  The surgery went fantastic.  Never had any pain.  Of course I aggressively relaxed if such a thing is possible.  I set up my couch with the TV remote, laptop, cell phone, house phone, light dimmer, pillows, blankets, eye shades, water, pills and the wonder machine - an electric water cooled knee wrap that pumped ice water from an Igloo cooler through tubes into a wrap.  All together, it worked great!  A friend recommended a short TV mini-series to watch so I downloaded that and made myself comfy.  To add an extra thrill to the week, the family decided to go on a "cleanse" diet to help get us ready to start losing weight.  That was a bit more "painful" but we didn't cheat and we made it through (and Mom - Lucie even had me eat 6 whole tomatoes on "Tomato Day!").  At the end of the week, I was down over 9 pounds (3.5% body weight - you do the math...).

Today was the first day of physical therapy and I was apprehensive that the pain I had avoided so far was going to come back in a big way.  Wrong.  PT was excellent.  I knew my legs were in great shape (it's just the rest of me...) so there is really very little for me to do.  Mostly stretching and flexibility exercises.  Probably 3-4 weeks, 3 times per week.  Insurance was supposed to be $50 per session but the PT place called my insurance company and then told me that I had met the deductible cost for the year (that's no surprise) so the $50 was waived!  I called the insurance company to verify but the agent said they were wrong.  Bummer.  I knew it was too good to be true.  30 seconds later the insurance company called back and said THEY were wrong - it was a matter of semantics but I had met the out-of-pocket expense for the year so yes, in fact, I did not need to pay the $50 co-pay!  Great!

So with that news, the weight loss, the leg feeling so much better than pre-surgery, my brain being no worse than ever and other things, life is looking up again.