From Greensboro with Love -Day 1 of the JRP

Last fall, when my buddy Caroline and I made a pact to support each other through our respective knee replacement surgeries, it felt like a huge AHA moment. That single folks could enlist their friends to spend a week in the medical/home care trenches and then expect the reverse in return. So simple, but eminently patentable as an idea. When we patent it, we will call it the Joint Replacement Protocol (JRP) and will make money hand over fist. Last October, neither of us had a date for our surgeries, so there was also a little russian roulette feeling to making such a commitment out in the future. My surgery date turned out to be February 26th, and Caroline said she could be there exactly a week and a day. The rules of the JRP care exchange were simple but elegant. Buy your plane ticket to your friend’s city and plan to drive the patient home from the surgery center. Be on call the remainder of the week to help with cooking and whatever the diva needs during that calendar week. Obviously we will flesh out the protocol before submitting for patent.

I am thrilled to be reciprocating Caroline’s service to me this past February this week, in the beautiful city of Greensboro, NC where she lives with her daughter, Lucy, and their cat Howie.

Clearly there are already traditions in this joint replacement protocol. When Caroline came out in February, we went out to a nice meal up in the hills at Castaway, overlooking Burbank. Sorry, no picture resulted from that dinner, but we had a lovely time, celebrating both my new left knee and my recent move into my new home. The period leading up to my surgery had been chaotic but fruitful. We were giddy to be together and completely oblivious to what followed after the surgery to come.

Caroline was much more discrete than I about taking pictures in the surgery center, so I don’t have any pre-surgery photos, but just this one newly arrived at home, walker visible at left along with my friend Karen’s hand truck in the background resting from the moving stresses of the previous week.

Our return from the surgery center required heroic actions from Caroline, who hadn’t driven in LA for a long time. My surgery, originally planned for 11:00 a.m. that day, had been pushed to 2:00 p.m., which meant that it was close to 8:00 p.m. and past sunset when I was released. We had a series of hijinks which I hoped to avoid here in Greenboro, including lack of familiarity with my car and how it started. Still quite out of it in the front seat, I hit the “home” button on my navigation system, forgetting that I had not yet programmed my new Toluca Lake address into the car, which meant the car doggedly steered us toward my downtown LA apartment address, which muddleheaded Els didn’t realize was happening until I got a text from my brother, who was waiting to help me from the car up to my apartment, saying “you are going the wrong way.” I’d shared our ETA with him. Oops. Unable to program the address into the car while it was moving, and uncertain that under the veil of post-surgery confusion I would be able to find our way, we exited the 5 freeway and stopped to enter the new address into the nav. Caroline’s first response was “You’ve got to be f$3king kidding me!” She was already stress-taxed with driving in the dark in LA, and didn’t need my incompetent navigational system to send us south instead of north. Now we were on some dark and winding road through Griffith Park! STOP! There in the road was a human being, head bloodied but not dead, sitting up in the middle of the road. There were people around and neither of us was in a state to be of any assistance, me with the leg and residual drugs in my system, Caroline with the stresses of caregiver and misdirected chauffeur. So we kept on going, Caroline muttering under her breath, “Could you find a road that was darker and more curvy than this, do you think?” Well, that’s the cleaned up version anyway.

The next week is a bit of a blur, but featured my doing laps around the living room and dining room on my walker, pain-free due to the block that I’d been given, but also due to the diligently followed medication plan which Caroline oversaw. As a sober person with close to forty years, I was truly terrified of getting carried away with the oxy in particular. Images of Matthew Broderick as the gleeful and evil Dr. Sackler haunted my psyche, but that quickly came to an end when my prescription plan put the kibosh on a refill of that opiate and I began to rely on the Extra Strength Tylenol coupled with Tramadol at night for pain management/sleep.

Through it all that first week, Caroline managed my care with grace and generosity. Throw in that I am a vegetarian, so I was asking her to work outside the boundaries of her culinary comfort, but she did, making meal after meal of yummy food.

Fast forward to Caroline’s surgery, which happened yesterday! I arrived on the red eye from LA via Dulles Wednesday morning, was met at the airport by Caroline and her daughter, Lucy. This step of the JRP had been skipped by me due to confusion over what time Caroline was arriving in LA, so I felt particularly guilty that she had had to navigate LAX to the uber lot and them take an uber to my place. Our trip to Caroline’s home wasn’t marred by bloody men in the street, just an unfortunately indecisive squirrel who stood in the middle of the lane and ended up being immortalized by Caroline’s tires. God bless the little fellow.

We followed the Joint Replacement Protocol (JRP) with precision. The night before the surgery requires a beautiful last supper out. Caroline had chosen the Print Works, near their house. Greensboro has this thing we don’t have in LA called “Weather” and there was a moment in the restaurant where everyone’s phone started to alert, notifying of severe weather, which was clear outside where the rain pelted the pavement and lightning and thunder abounded. The restaurant lights flickered a few times after that, but our delicious and celebratory meal wasn’t interrupted.

Caroline and Lucy have a very charismatic black cat named Howie, who took to the pillow that Caroline used to elevate her leg on the ottoman in the living room. It now bears his black fur. Howie is a hoot. It’s so nice to meet him after hearing so much about him.

The Surgery Center of Greensboro (SCG) is a large, three story contemporary building very close to the hotel/restaurant we’d had dinner last night. We checked into the SCG at 6:45 a.m., the lobby and parking lot very full already. Their efficiency was impressive. Their staff called people to the desk with booming, welcoming voices. As in all medical situations these days, the paperwork was done before. They took Caroline back and I tracked her progress on a TV that listed all patients and their status by number and initials. #16 to Pre-Op, then quickly to Anesthesia. I was worried I wouldn’t see her again before the surgery, but at about 8:20 a.m., they came to get me and I went in to visit with her for a few minutes in her pre-surgical loopiness. Honestly, Caroline loopy is almost presidential. Not like the current president, mind you, but more Obama – like. I would have full confidence in her running the country now – she was way more coherent than some we’ve seen in that role. But I digress. At 8:40 a.m., a team of three nurses swept into the room and started disconnecting things so that they could take her to the OR, dropping me off at the waiting room, where I was prepared to read and hang out for the next seventy-five minutes.

Soon, a young woman in scrubs came out to let us know that there was a coffee truck outside the building if we wanted to get coffee. I exited quickly, envisioning a dozen people behind me, and found the truck, labeled Grandma’s, LLC. It was the first day SCG had invited the truck there according to the nurse I spoke with; most of the clientele were in scrubs. I didn’t know how the OR nurses could afford the 25 minutes it took to get our coffee. I wondered if it wasn’t a ploy to name the company that? After all, who would dare criticize Grandma for being slow? We all waited patiently upwind of the generator that blasted by the front of the truck. At one point I turned to the others waiting and said, “Now I know I’m a legitimate addict.” Back inside, I was very happy with my latte which I sipped until I spoke with the surgeon post procedure, and was able to go to the recovery area to see Caroline.

USC take notice – this Surgery Center provided both the patient and their visitor with boxed lunches and sodas. I thought it was sweet that my Diet Coke said “Friend” on the side, while Caroline’s did not. After my surgery, think I got crackers and juice and I’m not sure Caroline got anything to eat for close to 8 hours. It was fascinating to hear/see the differences in protocols between our two surgeries.

In the time between speaking with the surgeon and the recovery room visit, I jumped out to pick up some CAVA bowls. (I didn’t know about the honeybaked ham lunch boxes yet). We then had our first home dinner all ready to go!

The nurses at the SCG were lovely and trust-inspiring. The post-op nurse, Desirée took plenty of time to explain at every phase of the next three hours what Caroline should expect before going home. She covered the medicines schedule in a clear way, and attached a neatly written postit on the discharge instructions with all the doses and times. The discharge instructions themselves were comprehensive and she went over them meticulously with both of us. The expectations for the next five days are so much higher than mine were, including starting on some of the exercises I’m doing now after four months on day four. Desirée got Caroline up and dressed and walking in the hall, up then down some practice stairs that reminded me of the ceremony I did as a six-year-old in the basement of the Presbyterian Church in Greensburg when I flew up from Brownies to Girl Scouts. Just without the wings pin.

Soon we were on our way home and into the house, icing up Caroline’s new knee, and she began all the exercises. Day one of our JRP went flawlessly.