Arley 3.0: Now With More Morphine

It's 5 days after surgery and this post is brought to you by the letter D for Dilauded AKA Hydromorphone AKA "Surgery? What surgery? Why am I dreaming of cartoon hamsters?" Yes, after my second hip replacement I am "keeping comfortable" on the same drug that's keeping Lindsey Lohan "comfortable" while she's chilling in jail. The only difference is that she got it for a minor dental procedure and I had to stay another night in the hospital because of the difficulties of getting a prescription for it, even though someone took power tools to my hip's joint space. Man, celebrity has its perks. (On that note, how does Lindsey Lohan get counted as a celebrity? Who is jail is thinking, "Well, I know she hijacked a car and drove three terrified passengers on a coke-fueled police chase...but she did gift the world with the cinematic brilliance that was "The Parent Trap," so let's call it a wash. Feel free to load up on sketchy, easily abused prescription meds before you do your time, darling!")

I was hoping to blog more recently after the surgery, but unfortunately there was no wireless internet in the hospital and I'm pretty sure that for the first few days, my blog posts would resemble the rants you hear on Hastings and Main in Vancouver. That means that I've got a lot of ground to cover. I'm going to break it down into smaller posts over the next few days, mostly since the letters are already kind of swimming on the page and my nap-per-paragraph ratio is roughly 1:1.

So....Arley Version 3.0 Coles Notes Edition. The biggest headline is that it didn't go exactly as expected: They didn't attach the gluteus medius because there was too much scar tissue. They did, however, replace the socket and ball. And they went in through the back door (that's what she said) so the whole thing should be much more stable. After the surgery, Dr. SecondOpinion told me that the result "won't be one of those hip replacements where the person walks well." (Oh, you wanted one of those? You should have specified!) So far, however, the results feel a million times better than the first time around. My hip's not clunking around the way it was before and I'm walking pretty well considering that everything in the area is still like, "Dude, WTF?"

I will blog more about the surgery when every sentence I write isn't being co-authored by a morphine derivative, but here are some teasers:

• Want to know what phrase you don't want to hear coming from a guy who's about to jam a big-ass needle into your spine? "Because I'm just learning, I'll be supervised by Dr. SoAndSo Here." And coming in a close second: "You're going to feel a poke....another poke....and another poke....Darn." (Perhaps the reason why it was so hard for me to get a Dilauded prescription is because of the track mark situation on my arms and back).
  
• Want to know a phrase that you should never have to say after receiving a spinal epidural? "Um....so.....am I supposed to, like, feel numb yet?"
  
• For the first few days, I dreamed of exploding cartoon hamsters, which struck me as such a stereotypical Oxycontin-fueled dream that I would amuse myself and wake up. You know you've spent too much time in academia when you are woken up by irony.
• Day 1: I felt freaking fantastic. Little pain, no nausea. I was the Queen of Surgery, the Princess of the Post-Op, I was mentally reinacting that "king of the world' scene in Titanic. I was like, "Wait...you mean....something might actually go....right?"
  
• Day 2: Let's just say there was more puking than a bulimic convention in an ice-cream shop.
• Let's also say that I will never again eat pea soup with noodles. And that for days after I was still finding specks of dried neon-green bile on my hospital bed...my desk lamp....my bedside table..... (Too much information? Too much information).
  
• The first day, my roommate was a guy who had broken both of his heels after his girlfriend threw $1800 of his money in $100 bills out the window and he jumped out the second-story window after it. (Suddenly, being single doesn't seem so bad).
• For the rest of the stay, my roommate was an elderly Asian man who talked in his sleep in a mixture of Chinese and English, resulting in such gems as "You need 30% more birth control!'
• I woke up this morning to my cat snuggling under my chin purring and sleepily licking my chin and was almost deliriously happy. Well, okay, the delirious part was probably the morphine, but still. Ah, cats: They love you and they never drop $1800 of your cash money out the window.

Okay, I'm off to drift into a drug-fueled slumber. Post more soon!