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.