Back in Parking Lot Heaven

This morning I unhooked my red temporary Handicapped Parking placard from my rear view mirror. It expired yesterday, June 4, five months less one day since the date of my hip replacement surgery.

I don’t mind seeing it go. I must admit, it got me into some great reserved parking spaces, at choked parking lots next to shopping malls, and on the nights we went to the ball game and the opera. But I got just a short sample taste of what it might be like to qualify for the placard permanently. Mobility restriction, after hip surgery, goes on long enough for the mind to start to adapt. It is a sobering moment, notable mainly for relief in realizing that all this trouble, trouble that I’m starting to get good at, is going to be temporary.

So this morning, five months to the day after my surgery, I unhooked the card with a sense that I was going home again, back to parking spaces in a different area code from the store or the restaurant or the event, from which walking is a genuine measure of freedom.

I’m still not totally familiar with my new left hip. For 62 years, I walked slightly on the outside of my foot, so the heels of my shoes wore down off-center. Now my left foot wants to roll in slightly, and it is the strangest feeling. Karen says I walk with a little hitch on that side, and I tell her it’s just temporary, until I know without thinking how my foot is going to land.

The strangest thing is the pain. There is none. For five years, I managed all the positions of daily living according to what the pain told me to do. It took energy. I have estimated that managing the pain in my hip consumed about half of my energy. Walking from the parking lot to my office was a trek. Walking from the house out to get the newspapers was a trek. I kept both feet planted, unless there was some absolute need, like walking, to move them, and I always knew where things were that I could lean against. I would never step over anything, and I couldn’t move furniture – a table or a chair – without lifting it, taking a step, setting it down, planting my feet, taking another step, setting it down.

“Every step an agony,” I liked to tell Karen, and I was only half-kidding.

Now that pain is gone. But the habits are not. I am re-learning chair carrying, and stepping over puppies. I can do yard work! I trimmed a hedge all by myself yesterday, bagged the trimmings, carried them to the street as if it were the most normal thing in the world. We are back into regular exercise, walking three times a week and hitting the gym three times a week, and by the end of the summer I expect the new hip will have 15 fewer pounds to haul around.

Everyone with any experience said this surgery would change my life, and it has. I feel like I have received a new start. If you are contemplating it, go ahead and do it. The first month is not fun, and the restrictions do go on long enough that you start to get used to them. Believe me, the five-month payoff, taking the red placard off your rear view mirror, will make all that worthwhile.