After The World’s Longest Hospitalization for a Simple Knee Replacement, my son became my cheerleader.

At 9 or 10, he already understood his mother’s need for encouragement.  Years before, he had invented a silly character who pranced around the house saying, “I am an old woman. . .”.  He deployed those antics whenever his mother grew despondent.  I would sit over my paperwork in the breakfast nook, struggling not to cry.  Patrick would stretch the back of his t-shirt over his head like a nun’s veil and begin to croon, “I am an old woman. . .”.  I got the giggles every time.

The knee replacement went badly.  I never made the degree of bend that the doctor demanded before discharge.  Seven weeks after the surgery, he finally released me from the hospital, ruling that I had come as close as I ever would.  I went home to a wheelchair-bound husband and a serious, thoughtful fourth-grade son, hopeful that all would be well.  A day later, my husband got crushed by his wheelchair lift and my hopes shattered on impact.

My recuperation took a back seat as we struggled to make sense of what had happened to Dennis.  His employer, Sprint, came through for us in many ways:  Visits to the hospital; catered meals; approval of long-term disability as he tried to recover from the hypoxemic episodes which nearly killed him. Meanwhile, I faced the challenge of learning to reciprocate stair-walk with a knee that refused to cooperate and spastic legs that loathed the metal now housed within them.   I had never been great at stairs.  I took them slowly, first one foot, then the other slid beside it.  But to make the knee work, I had to bring each foot to the step above, challenging enough for spastic legs but doubly so learning to use a recalcitrant replacement joint inside resentful muscles.

Everywhere that my son and I went, he would cajole me into taking the stairs “the right way”, reciprocating, as he knew I was supposed to do.  He praised every clumsy effort.  I kept trying, inspired by his encouragement, not wanting to let him down.  Eventually, I could do it without more effort than I was willing to expand.  My physical therapist cheered.  I satisfied the last tick in her box and she, too, discharged me to continue with my normal life.

This morning, as I climbed the stairs to the gorgeous wood-clad room which sold this house to me twenty-three years ago, I remembered the agony of the hours which I spent in therapy, trying to force my right leg to behave.  A recent visitor asked me, How can you climb these stairs every day?  Why isn’t your bedroom on the first floor?  I looked around the beautiful haven of my bedroom with its cathedral ceiling, the rocking chair, my wooden thrift-store desk, and my new beautiful bathroom.  I smiled.  I can’t make sense of it for someone not living inside my soul.  I answered as well as I could:  I climb those stairs because I can.

It’s the ninth day of the twenty-ninth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

On the wall under the new light fixture hangs an angel which my son gave me for Christmas in 2014.