Hip Joint

Iaman had surgery a couple of weeks ago to replace one of his hip joints with an artificial one. The surgery went well and he went home the next day.
    Hip joint surgery is a big deal. It's major surgery. Any time you go in for surgery there is a risk that you are not going to come out of it. Doctors have a pretty good idea of what they are doing, but people are complicated and it's entirely possible that something weird will happen and they won't be able to cope with it. The odds of something bad happening are pretty low, but they are not zero.
    My father had trouble with his artificial hip. He went in the hospital and spent the next six months in there or in rehab before he passed away. He was old.
    My father-in-law went in for surgery to replace one of his hip joints a couple of years ago. He survived the surgery fine, but then he lapsed into a coma for a week or so. They suspect he had a small stroke. He woke up and seems to be mostly there, but he has trouble walking, so he's in rehab. He's about the same age as my father was.
    All this is to show that Iaman's going in for surgery was fraught with terror, kind of like taking your first flight in a plane. Everyone tells you it's safe but there was that news report last week about the plane that fell out of the sky and everyone on board died. What if the same thing happens to your flight? I mean it might.

    Iaman survived and went home and he's flying high until the anesthetic wears off a couple of days later. By now he's started taking morphine so he's feeling no pain. A few days later he steps down to Oxycodone. He lives in a retirement community and he knows several people there who have had the same operation and they tell him things like the recovery was no big deal. They quit the Oxy after a couple of days and were just taking Tylenol. They're big fat liars. That might be the way the remember it, but that's because they were high on Oxy.
    After a few days of Oxy, Iaman tries cutting back. It doesn't work so well. He's supposed to take a pill every six hours. If he skips one, 30 mintues later everyone knows he's skpped his pill. Grimacing, he relents and takes his medicine.
    This surgery has about the same impact on your body as if somebody broke your leg with an ax. It's gonna hurt, and it's gonna hurt bad for a while. That's why the doc gave him a case of narcotics the week before. He's gonna need them.