The Healthy

If you seek Web-osity this week, look elsewhere. I’m all about the health, today. Just a couple of hours ago, my wife and I were in the presence of an orthopedic surgeon, as he said the words nobody wants to hear, “You’ll likely have this the rest of your life”.

There was no comfort in him saying this to Kathie, and not me. We are in this together, after all. This was almost as much my ankle, as hers. There is a high degree of finality to this one, I fear. We could continue to work out in some fashion and lose weight. That would help. It would take a great deal of strain off of her ankle, which has basically been ground down to sawdust. But it won’t get better. We are used to seeing and hearing that kind of resolution, generally just before the last commercial. And every week someone has built an artificial chin or elbow or something and we see reporters talking with folks in lab coats while wounded vets relearn walking skills in the background. But there will be no new ankle.

Twenty years ago, Kathie used to walk nearly everywhere. She lived close to her job, and walked there-and-back every day, sometimes twice a day if she came home for lunch. I used to catch her on one or another trip from time to time, with a stately gait full of poise and posture, generally with a hat.

In the early-middle ‘90s, Kathie fell in the bathroom of a motel. We had gone to Omaha, to go to the zoo and see the big new exhibit of the day. She slipped coming out of the shower and was never the same. We had an HMO back then, and they were famous for not wanting to see you unless you were bloody or on fire. They told her it was “a bad sprain” and gave her some pain killers. Over time she became almost accustomed to it and would only occasionally bring it up. They would nod and say that yeah, oftentimes those bad sprains heal slower than a broken bone. We motored on.

And over time, she slowed down. She lost that poise and precision, the dignity and the grace in her stride. We stopped walking downtown to dinner and movies and attractions, which was once one of the drawing cards of our apartment. Over time we both started gaining weight, which only makes matters worse. They told us today that forces and stresses in the feet are routinely three to four times our body weight, so every pound meant three or four in the sneakers. Things got worse.

The spiral continued for several years and honestly, I stopped hearing the little grunts and complaints getting into and out of chairs and cars after a while. But in the last year it has gotten much worse and we found ourselves finally thinking of taking the New Home money and using it to get a car she could get into and out of easier.

I really enjoy this time of year, from the standpoint of measuring progress on goals. This year we joined a health club when it finally became obvious even to us that we were out of control. But it became easy to skip going when every time we went it hurt. Now she’s looking at mostly swimming for a while, and we both wonder about the stairs at home.

This isn’t a death sentence. There isn’t any cornball homily stitched above our sofa about how we are living with devastated joint pain instead of dying from it. We have a lot of years ahead of us, and most of them promise to be good ones. But this is probably the day we changed from being “the kids” to being Old People. It should be noted that this is way different from being grown ups.

Neither of us have had anything like this in our lives, before. You get a cold on the third, it’s better by the seventh of the month. You wake up with a headache, it’s usually gone by the afternoon. I have seasonal allergies, but I have some really good days in July and November and March. Even Kathie’s diabetes is controlled through medication, and we have seen any number of stories of people who lost weight and became active enough that they needed no medication whatsoever. But this is the first thing either of us have had that will never go away.

I don’t know what the future brings, but I suspect there’ll be more salads in it.