August 26 - Lost in the Dark

Since my knee surgery I have been finding it difficult to sleep through the night. Lying in one position for very long becomes painful but rolling over to change position is also a painful process. I find that I need to wake up to shift around. Sometimes, I just get up and walk a few laps around the inside of the house in order to limber up. This was what I was doing last night when I got lost in our bedroom.

Because Lyle has been so good to me during the day, when I get up to do my nightly jaunt around the house, I don’t turn on the lights. Certainly one of us needs to get some sleep! Basically I have a little route from our bedroom, down the hall to the kitchen and living room and back to the starting point. If I was doing this without assistance, I would likely just feel along the walls but as I don’t want to bump into any furniture with my knee I have been taking the walking frame. Normally I do the 75 steps without any trouble but the walker doesn’t give me as much sense of direction as I would like. However, last night as I re-entered the bedroom, my mind must have been wandering and I lost track of where I was standing.

I knew right away that I wasn’t pointed to the bed ...but where was I? I let go of the walker and felt all around me. Nothing – and this in spite of the fact that our bedroom isn’t all that large. I moved forward with the walker and hit something on the floor but I still couldn’t identify where I was. At one point I touched Lyle’s foot in the bed but that still didn’t do the trick. I would have tried to find my way back to the light switch but that was also a non starter. Finally, I called out to Lyle. I was sorry to wake him up but I was lost and really I needed to get back to bed.

All this reminded me that my vision is not of the twenty-twenty kind. I know that when my sight first changed, seeing in the dark was one of the first things to go. Since then, I have learned that this loss of night vision is fairly common with many eye conditions. My friend, Norma has RP (retinitis pibmentosa) and said that even as a youngster she couldn’t see well in the dark. However, when the lights went out, she thought that she was seeing the same way that other people saw. Another friend, George, walks without assistance during the daylight hours but as soon as the light dims, he is instantly in need of his white cane or other assistance to find his way around.

I haven’t thought of this particular aspect of vision loss for some time but last night’s little misadventure brought it all to mind. Who would have thought that I could get lost in the bedroom of our own house!

 

 

August 14 - After Knee Replacement

Nearly four weeks now since my surgery and sometimes I feel as if I am only taking very small baby steps towards recovery. One thing I have learned through this is that I definitely shouldn’t compare my own journey to that of others.

This has been only too easy to do. A new friend, Barbara, had knee replacement surgery just three days before I did. We have kept in touch and I know that she is far ahead of me on the road to recovery. Nevertheless, she is one of the first people to remind me that we are all different and that I shouldn’t expect that we will all move forward at the same pace.

This is a lesson I should have learned with my journey of vision loss. It is a lesson that I often tell the other members of my support group. Even though we might be diagnosed with the same eye condition, or measured with the same degree of vision loss, we are all individuals and we react to those circumstances on an individual basis.

This was also brought to my attention in the content of a book I have been listening to. The author was diagnosed with NAION. This fairly rare condition is caused by a stroke that affects the optic nerve. In the author’s case, the stroke reduced the sight in his one eye while the other remained intact. He was told that there was the possibility sometime in the future that this could also happen in his good eye.  When I compared this to other more severe challenges of vision loss that I have heard of, I’m afraid that I wasn’t as compassionate as I could have been. Yet, to this author, the episode was traumatic – even life altering. I needed to remind myself that we are all different and that circumstances can have differing impacts on our lives. The effect of NAION to this man was just as real to him as diagnoses of lesser or greater diagnoses in others.

So, this is what I am coping with in the days after my knee replacement. I am not the same as other people who have had the same procedure. I must struggle along with my own journey. I must do the prescribe exercises and count the baby steps of improvement in my own journey.

 

 

 

August 5 - Knee Replacement

For the past couple of years I have often dated events in my life as either BC or AC. That is, I have referred to them as Before COVID or After COVID. Today I have a new saying – BKR or AKR. Yes, things seem to be different either before or after my knee replacement surgery.

The operation was just over two weeks ago now. Until that point in time, I found myself in lots of aching pain and had even started to limp a bit when I was walking. The surgery has supposedly taken care of both of these things, but as I am still on the road to recovery, I can assure you that right now I am still in lots of pain and walking very carefully. The surgery was quite traumatic.

So, the experience is now all AKR, but that isn’t what I want to write about. I had the knee operation done in Phoenix, Arizona. Those readers who live in Alberta could very well guess at the reason for this location so I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say that the waiting list in Alberta was just a bit too long!

The medical team in Phoenix was excellent and I couldn’t have received better care. We flew to Phoenix five days before the surgery in time for me to have a CT Scan, an MRI, x-rays and a pre-surgery consultation with the surgeon. I didn’t know any of the medical staff previously so I was very clear in indicating my vision loss. I wore my identity badge and used my white cane. Every single person we encountered responded positively to my vision disability. It was almost as if they had been trained specifically in dealings with people who had vision loss.

The aftermath of the surgery hasn’t been great – lots of pain and swelling but I am hopeful that this stage of recovery will be short term. I am certainly doing my part with ice, elevation and exercise. Now I will continue with life events that are AKR – after knee surgery and going forward with a new chapter in my life.