Thank you for your prayers today: thank you, too, especially to those who emailed, sent messages, about my hospital appointment this morning. I asked God – and you to pray for it for me! – for wisdom last night, and one of my last thoughts was that I wouldn’t be under the ‘pressure’ I was told to expect from the Orthopaedic Consultant.
In fact, she was great. She did have a good old push, pull, twist of my legs, which isn’t a blessing right now(!) but when I woke this morning the pain levels were pretty manageable. The doctor very honestly ran through the options – including the fact that – for some reason, with knees – infection can easily set in, and that you can die! Also, the fact that a good %age (upwards of 40-40) are NOT successful, and then, if that’s the case, there’s no way back: I couldn’t get my old knee out of the freezer and have it re-inserted! Her feeling was that it wasn’t a good move right now, though if I’d insisted, she’d have booked me in….
A wonderful couple of friends, my Australian friends in Virginia, called last night. Bev is a physical therapist at a large, and very good hospital, in the States: she had her knee done in early April last year…. she of course, in her work, helps people with recuperative treatment from such surgery, the rehab, physio, etc. 9 months on, from having her knee done by a surgeon she could ‘cherry pick’ due to her position, knowledge of all the surgeons, and their success rates (he told her it was a ‘text book replacement’) – Bev says her pain levels have gone down from (on a 1-10 scale) from 10 to…..between 8 & 9. Hmmm. She and Ian know me very well, they know exactly what I do, and support me in many ways. Bev’s first words to me last night were…’ Whatever you do, don’t have your knee replaced!’. I’d asked for wisdom, had no idea they’d ring, and so with words that others shared, some to the contrary, I asked God to make it ‘easy’ for me to say ‘no’ without them refusing to treat me further into the future with pain-killers etc.
Bev, knowing a lot more about the internal state of my knee because of her work, reckoned that just one done would take me out of action for 18 months….and the surgeon, Lisa McConnell, said pretty much the same, and, with one prosthetic, the second would take even longer to rehabilitate. I’m ‘blessed’ with a high pain threshold, I reckon my knees – on a bad day – are 10, on a good day, 7-9: I do know that I CAN walk, I now know that I can’t do any more damage to them than is already done(!!), and if I can live with the pain, she said ‘See you in a year!’.
What I also felt last night was this: that humanly, I’d love to live without that level of pain, and spiritually have questions of God that I haven’t asked….and that, in saying ‘no’ today it would leave ONLY the course of action open for God to heal which I felt he’d been waiting for me to twig! So…. no new knees, and now… c’mon Lord!
