Lessons Learned From A Fall: Recovery Works Better Consistent Than Quick
reflections on what healing sometimes requires
Since my recent fall, a few weeks back, which shattered my hip joint, and then the surgery that replaced that and a good portion of my tibia, a number of people have expressed their sympathy and well wishes. I’m glad for the good will, but there is one recurring expression that, as I’ve been going through the early stages of recovery, I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I’m not going to knock anyone for saying it, any more than I would people who use stock phrases like “I’m sorry for your loss” at a funeral. It’s a common knee-jerk reaction, I think. But when you approach the matter thoughtfully, it’s a bit off-base, and we can learn something by considering it.
Probably 70-80% of the many people who have written comments in response to my occasional posts about my accident, the surgery, my recovery, and recent visit with my orthopedic surgeon have conveyed that sentiment. “Fast”, “rapid”, “speedy” are the common terms, along with “soon”. Again, I’ll stress that there’s nothing wrong with such expressions on their part. For some people, such comments might be very welcome. They just land rather flat for me, for two main reasons, one of which has to do with me and my own temperament, the other of which has to do with the kind, severity, and complexity of the injury and the surgery.
Pretty much all of my life, I’ve been — not in every area, but in enough of them — what you might call a “high performer”. I don’t idle well, and I have often measured my own aptitudes, achievements, and successes by how much I could economize and use time. Getting work done faster than the average person, for example. Being quick to comprehend matters and to come up with well-informed, reliable judgements. Even in physical matters, running or biking faster than others and passing them up, building muscle quicker, packing in more workouts, those have been temptations for me. So the idea that I ought to do, or that something happen for me, faster than usual expectations, that plays into that longstanding tendency on my part.
If you’re used to being ahead of the curve, and you expect that to be the case as well in some matter that it likely won’t happen in, that can prove a real psychological kick in the guts in a way it might not be to other people. When you allow your expectations to range ahead of you like that into the near future, when things take longer, drag on because they’re a complex mess, it can be dismaying and lead even to despair. That’s not usually how things work for me anymore, but that’s because over years of philosophical study and practice, I’ve developed not just more resilience but more realistic attitudes towards the things I hope for.
Hip replacement surgery usually involves a fairly long process of recovery, not as rough as knee replacement, to be sure, or some other surgeries. Most often, it’s something scheduled. You go in for it, they put you under, they perform the surgery, you wake up in the recovery room, and later that day, they hopefully get you taking your first hobbling, tentative, perhaps painful (depending on what they dose you with) steps. As my surgeon made sure to drive home in our follow meeting earlier this week, that’s not remotely my case.
The injury I sustained in this rather improbable accident shattered the head of my femur inside the hip joint itself, fragmenting it beyond any future organic repair or healing. In fact, when I got an x-ray in the emergency department, it showed one bone fragment about 2 cm long, entirely detached from the femur, stuck in the hip joint. After I fell, I tried to get up on my own and couldn’t, crawled on the floor over to a chair, and leveraged myself up. After that, we tried using crutches to get me out of our living space, and had to instead use a medi-transport chair. I didn’t just damage the hip by falling on it, but also with these attempts to move after I fell.
When the surgeon performed the hip replacement operation, he sawed a good bit of the femur off. All that was replaced by the titanium implant, which (as he showed me on an x-ray, again this week, had to be fitted tightly into the femur. In fact, it extends halfway down that bone. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the movement of the hip and ball, so mid-operation, he removed the first cap and spike, and replaced them with a second one that fit the new titanium hip joint complex much better. I’m glad that he did so, but the operation all told wound up taking about twice as long as the norm for a hip replacement.
He stressed, and said that he could not stress enough, the amount of trauma and damage to various soft tissues, to muscles, tendons, ligaments, and just to my body overall was not comparable to a standard, scheduled hip replacement. Emergency hip replacement is something quite different, and takes a good bit longer to heal up entirely. You still do the same things in terms of physical and occupational therapy, but you can expect it to take longer to get fully back on your feet, as it were. For me, the most disappointing part of that is that it dashed hopes that I might be back in the classroom, meeting with and teaching my students, relatively soon. But as the saying goes, it is what it is.
What’s really important is not the rapidity with which I heal, but instead how the complex of tissues and systems of different sorts knit themselves back together in my body in myriad complex ways. That takes time, and happens in gradual steps, each of which makes way for the next. What really matters is all that complicated, cumulative bits of healing that add up slowly over time, aided of course by doing my part: avoiding further injury, eating decent food at regular times, trying to sleep through the night and taking naps when I need them, engaging in my daily PT exercises, getting myself around first on a walker and now a cane.
Each day, I’ve experienced a bit of new progress on one front or another. I remember when, after a week of being at home, I was able to lift my foot on its own again without using my hand or the “leg-lifter” the hospital sent me home with. Small victories, but advances to celebrate nonetheless. Day by day, I’m regaining strength, stability, flexibility, mobility, and some measure of independence. It happens in little increments that mutually interlock with and reinforce each other. My pain levels have been tapering down, even with easing myself off of painkillers, aided by stretching, icing, walking around, and doing PT (which of course, also hurts sometimes).
It’s excellent to see and feel this gradual day-by-day progress. There’s a lot more ahead of me, innumerable little steps, little bits to integrate into something we call “healing” or “recovery” or “getting better.” Taking it all in, considering the enormity of what is required to get back to full health, just in this respect of one’s replaced hip, some people might experience all sorts of negative feelings (which is why perhaps they would prefer not to think about it, or to imagine it in simplified manners). That isn’t the case for me, but that’s because to me it resembles other big projects that I’ve worked on over the years, where there are many steps, and where it’s less a matter of getting things accomplished fast, and more about steady, consistent, multifaceted progress that has to be made, earned, or even sometimes clawed. Writing my dissertation was something like that, as was the work that went into my first book, and both of those required years, while this is likely going to be a matter of months.
I’m good with all of this recovery taking the while it’s clearly going to. Again, there’s not a lot of point in correcting well-intentioned expressers of sympathy, even if they ring a bit hollow to the recipient. But what really matters to me is the reintegration of body that takes its own time. It would be lovely, though unlikely, for people to wish that that happens at the tempo best suited to what the laborious process really requires.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.