SURGERY

I just heard yesterday that I now have a date for my hip replacement surgery. I was intially told that I'd be waiting for 2 - 3 months, thanks to OR backups due to the Covid-19 epidemic. It seems that things have opened up significantly, because they are now able to fit me in the day after Easter Sunday, just a couple of weeks from now. Between now and then there are classes, online or phone meetings with doctors, nurses, physical therapists and so on. Blood tests... It looks like I'll be busy with medical appointments for a while to come.

I have to say that I'm relieved to have the surgery sooner rather than later. Friends who have been through the procedure assure me that it's a suprisingly easy process, and that recovery is very fast. They have you back on your feet almost immediately following surgery, and there are follow-up physical therapy dates the same day, the next day, and several days thereafter. I hear, too, that it's a great release from the pain that has become familiar in recent months, almost a friend. The pace of progress in medical interventions such as this has been little short of miraculous. Hip and knee replacement have become pretty much routine procedures. Just twenty years ago, did these things even exist? I suppose so, but they were certainly far less common than they are today.

Today is a bright one, sunny and cold in Southern California, as I sit looking out over our balcony, past the city of Hollywood to the hills. We seem to be nearing not the beginning of the end, as Churchill said, but at least end of the beginning of the battle against the pandemic that besets us. If public health experts are to be believed, as I think they should be, we need more patience than many are now showing if we are to persist. We could very easily mess this up and find ourselves back at that proverbial square one. Let's hope not!