that's vidya for ya

When we got home, my brother and grandparents were there to greet me. My mom stayed for another week to help me around the house. Getting in and out of bed was still tough, and I needed her help to get out. To speed up my recovery, I was to go for many short walks every day. There’s a park just next to my house, so my mom and I would walk on the path around it twice a day, and eventually three times per day. I was still in a great deal of pain, despite taking painkillers every four hours. One indirect side effect of the pain killers was that I had a poor sleep schedule. Because I could only take them every four hours, if I missed one I would either have to wait until I was due for my next dose or I would have to stay up later. I would set an alarm for 5:50am and try to take a painkiller at six. That way if I kept to the schedule, I would take one 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and finally 10pm so I could go to bed at a reasonable hour. Unfortunately, I often missed this alarm or would miss a dose...

After standing up for the first time, I felt a bit more confident. Later that evening the physical therapists came to my room again and said I was going to try to walk. We went through the ordeal of getting me out of bed again, and I walked out into the hallway. Walking felt strange; I don’t know how to describe it. I felt very unstable, but was able to make it to the end of the hallway and back to my room where I sat in a wheelchair again. It makes sense to me that I felt unstable; my upper body was like a plank now. I imagined it like I was balancing a stick. The stories I had read from other people who had gone through the same surgery made it sound like walking was some extremely difficult ordeal. I didn’t experience it as super difficult. The instability slowly went away over the coming days, and by the time I was ready to be discharged I could even climb stairs. On Wednesday I walked some more, and that evening I was released from the intensive care unit back to the inpatient ...