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So I seem to have survived my knee surgery. I’m still feeling a bit drowsy and loopy so this entry may be a bit brief.

The last thing I remember was being rolled into the operating room, moving myself from the gurney to the operating table, and joking with the surgeon about a Monty Python skit. The anesthesiologist fed a cocktail into my arm and I told her that about the taste of copper in my mouth. There was a clear plastic oxygen mask with two flexible hoses leading out of it placed over my mouth and nose.

Then it goes blank. During this time the surgeon drained the effusion of fluid surrounding my knee. They then made an lateral incision across the front of my kneecap. After pulling back the soft tissue, they began to file away the new bone growth that had previously held my fractured kneecap together. This was done to create smooth and clean surfaces for the bones to bond together again. Small holes were drilled into the top and bottom of my kneecap, where the tendons attach, into which small metal pins were inserted. Once these were in place, wire was wrapped around the pins and across the front of my knee.

Then I was back in a bed in the recovery room, and I can start to remember again. Ryan, Brad and Amber were there, we were talking, joking, but I was still very much under the effects of the anesthesia. I would drift off to sleep every other moment, I was mumbling, my eyes were very heavy. I couldn’t stop scratching my nose and forehead, and I later learned that the dilaudid (a painkiller opioid) they dosed me with interacts with histamine receptors, which is why my face was so itchy.

Somehow I made it from the bed into a wheelchair, out of the hospital, and into Amber’s car. Amber took my back to their house, and it wasn’t long before I was back in another bed, surrendering the illusion of mental acuity.

This morning I woke up no longer feeling the mental effects of the general anesthetic, but much more painfully aware of the condition of my knee. I’m still relying pretty heavily on hydrocodone to keep the pain tolerable, and as a result am pretty drowsy throughout the day.

More coherent posts to follow.