In June of 2013, I had arthroscopic surgery performed on my right knee to repair the two tears in the meniscus in there. It helped for a while but only for a while. A little over three years later, I had the entire knee replaced. The day after the first of these procedures, I posted this story of how my mother had her knee replaced…
My knee surgery yesterday reminded me of a Tale of My Mother I haven't told yet. You'll see the punchline to this one coming well before we get to it.
Over the years, due in no small part to a lifetime of cigarettes, she was losing her ability to walk. Both legs were very bad and her right knee hurt her terribly. One of her legion of doctors finally told her that knee replacements would be necessary. They'd do one and then after she had recovered from that surgery — and that could take quite a while — they'd do the other. My mother didn't like the idea of such extreme surgery but she less liked the idea of not being able to walk. Extensive x-rays and tests were done and a date for the first operation was set. A few days before, I took her into the hospital to meet the surgeon who'd actually be performing the procedure. He announced, much to her horror, "We're going to do the left knee first."
This was to her horror because the right knee was the one that had really been aching her. She knew both were bad but the left knee, at least, didn't hurt much. She asked, "Can't you do the right knee first, doctor?" He put the x-ray up on one of those wall-mounted lightboxes and began pointing out things on it that we would both have to have graduated medical school to understand.
"I understand the right knee's the one giving you pain," he said when he finally dialed it down to Layman's English. "But the left one is the one that's about to go. It could just about explode on you at any time. If we do the right knee first and then the left one goes before you can get around on the right knee, you'll really have trouble."
She understood that but said, "I just dread the idea of having to get around on the painful right knee for six or more months."
It was at this point that I asked the question that you would have asked, too: "Doctor…I apologize in advance for this but could you just please humor me for a second? Could you check and see if these x-rays you're pointing at aren't mixed-up?"
"Certainly," he said. He put each x-ray in turn up on the lightbox for even closer study and within moments, we heard him exclaim with his own horror and embarrassment, "Jesus Christ…these are mislabeled." The left said RIGHT on it and the right said LEFT on it.
He was furious with the folks in the x-ray department and he immediately picked up the phone and read someone the Riot Act, the Trespass Act, the Stamp Act and at least two of the three acts of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. He assured us repeatedly that the mistake would have been caught well before they operated but…well, the whole thing would have made you uneasy, too. We went to my mother's primary care physician who, in addition to being a brilliant and trustworthy man who'd taken care of her for many decades, was a senior official with the hospital.
He read the remaining act of Marat/Sade to many people and I think got someone fired or at least transferred to a less critical position. I imagined this person being reassigned to the hospital cafeteria and sitting there all day, labeling the egg salad sandwiches as tuna. At her primary doctor's urging though, we agreed to trust the surgeon we'd met with.
Well, almost trust. The morning of the operation before I took her in, I took a big marker and wrote WRONG KNEE on the wrong knee. That day, the right knee was the right knee.
Yesterday when I went in for my knee operation, I thought of doing that but right after I got into the humiliating gown, the nurse produced a marking pen, asked me to point to the knee they'd be working on and then she scrawled something on it. A few minutes later, my surgeon came in for a pre-surgery conversation and he had a pen and he asked me to point to the knee they'd be working on. I showed him it had already been tagged…but as he started to put the pen away, I said, "You know, a great artist is supposed to always sign his work." He laughed and added his initials to my right kneecap. (I wonder if they're still on there. It's all bandaged up at the moment.)
Getting back to my mother: They did operate on the correct knee and according to her primary physician and everyone else there, it went as well as could be expected with a woman in her mid-seventies and in as bad physical condition as she was. It took an awfully long time to heal and she began to announce that when the time came to have the other one done, she wasn't going to have the other one done. Too much pain, not enough gain. As it turned out, by the time her left knee might have come up for consideration, her health had deteriorated in too many other ways. The doctors said it was too dangerous…and unlikely to help her much even if it was successful.
For about the last sixteen years of her life, she got around her house in short distances using a walker. When we took her anywhere, she was wheelchaired about…or more correctly, transportchaired about. There's a difference between a wheelchair and a transport chair, though even people who know that difference use the terms interchangeably. She had a transport chair, which is also known as a companion chair. Briefly, the difference is that if you're in a wheelchair, others will push you about but you can propel and steer yourself around to some degree. In a transport or companion chair, someone else has to push you all the time. In fact, I bought her two transport chairs.
One was a fancy, expensive-looking (but not that expensive) and sturdy one that I kept in the trunk of my car. In fact, when I bought my current car in 2010, I told the saleslady, "Okay, I'll take it…if we can fit my mother's wheelchair into its trunk." I hauled it out of the old car, placed it into the one I was about to purchase and said, "Okay, write it up!"
She was very pleased with that chair. Made of shiny, dark blue metal and sporting a thick seat cushion, it had a Nascar feel to it. When I took her to the hospital, as I seemed to do daily for a while there, there'd be other folks around in wheelchairs — drab, battered ones that the hospital had around. My mother loved being seen in her "throne." It seemed to say that someone cared about her. Which was true…and it wasn't just her son who did.
Then she also had a lighter, foldable one I got her. It too looked snazzier than the chairs transporting most patients around the hospital. She kept this one at her home and it was used by her various caregivers when they took her places. They'd take her to the market or take her to the hairdresser. That is, when they weren't robbing her. She liked this chair, too.
When she passed away, I gave the Nascar one to someone else in my life — a performer of some note and a person I love a lot. This person needed a chair and I couldn't think of a better recipient.
I kept the foldable companion chair because I figured, "One of these days, someone else I know is going to have a need for it." And last week, I found someone who did: Me. In preparation for my knee surgery, I had a whole day of running around Cedars-Sinai Hospital and I decided it would be a lot less painful to make it a whole day of two friends pushing me around the place. I didn't stay in the chair all day. They'd push me to an office and then I'd hop out and use my limited ability to walk to get around. Others in the waiting room would look at me like I was Guy Caballero on SCTV, being pushed around in a wheelchair he didn't need, just to make others work and wait on him.
I didn't feel the slightest bit of shame at that. What I did feel was a lot of, "So this is what the world looked like to my mother all those years."
