Sparky’s Rocky Road to Recovery

Please forgive me for having been off the radar scope for almost two months. Many of you have been kind enough to say that you missed reading my posts with your morning coffee so I am hastening to patch up the hiatus in your schedule. My journey during the gap can be divided into three sections as follows:

Left hip total replacement surgery for a broken femur with a one-month convalescence on the orthopedic ward.

A one-month stay on the rehabilitation ward compromised by a serious infection from a welcome home cat- scratch from my buddy Spike which caused my already traumatized leg to swell up like a bowling pin.

I have now been home for 10 days and aside from experiencing an earthquake and a hurricane with three days without electricity, my return home has been uneventful. I hasten to grab this opportunity to publicly thank my dear friends Rosemary and Charlie who allowed me to become a member of their family. I truly felt powerfully cared for.

Much to my pleasant surprise my former wooden leg is starting to return to close to normal functioning and I can actually walk, carefully and slowly, without assistance, for short distances. I have folded up my wheelchair permanently.

Leaving aside the physical changes which were large in themselves, I want to smoothly move across the corpus callosum to my right hemisphere and access the emotional changes that these physical changes have initiated. They are easy to enumerate:

My relationship with my son Davyd has significantly changed in incredibly positive direction. He could not have been more patient and supportive and it is easy to say that I can look upon him with fresh new eyes.

I guess that my concept of him as my son may have blocked me from seeing him as an independent person in his own right. Well, that dynamic is now ancient history.

The support of my friends, in thousands of ways, has been a revelation to me. My stainless steel model has always led me to be self-contained and I functioned with the unfortunate motto,” Just suck it up.”

Three examples will suffice:

A. My x-wife with whom I maintain a cordial adult relationship based upon our shared guardianship of our granddaughter was thoughtful enough to visit me in the hospital and bring me a thermos filled with homemade borscht. This, of course, represents soul food for me and the generosity of her act will stay with me permanently.

B. A dear friend whom I have known for almost 20 years came to visit me and gave me an incredible foot massage which, in addition to its physical comfort had an additional spiritual component as well.

C. A very dear friend and her husband came to visit me and sat with me as I picked at my hospital dinner. It was hard to concentrate on the conversation since this Mozart quartet from Don Giovanni kept playing in my head due to the pleasure of the company.

In order to celebrate all that has happened to me, I am inviting 50 of my dear friends to ride with me on a bus to Fallingwater, in western Pennsylvania. I have visited this house on many occasions and to me, it is my church. Rest assured that I will post a blog dealing with that glorious experience. To be continued…………….

The emotional changes that these physical changes have initiated.

I cannot pass by this important point without expressing my great debt of gratitude to my Equadorian cyber- pal Larry T. After hearing me on the topic of body image changes he was generous enough to call my attention to a book by Oliver Sacks called “A Leg to Stand On.” This is truly an amazing book and I read it in one gulp. I was able to strongly identify with much of the details that the author had to go through when he had a similar injury and it gave me very important new insights into the connection between my injury and my emotional state. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is faced with a body dysmorphic injury.