It’s not you hip…..it’s knee

After 3 and 1/2 years of tolerating knee pain that was caused by a knee injury I sustained while playing hoops (I first mentioned it in this blog post and then again in this blog post), I finally took care of it.  Last Tuesday I had a partial knee replacement.  For the last year and a half, my running was pretty much limited to my Zero Runner.  Thank God for the Zero Runner.  It maintained my sanity by allowing me to keep my miles up when running outside was becoming less and less of an option.

After the surgery, I felt great.  I felt so great, I thought I was invincible.  In fact, here is a video of me a day after the surgery.  Hey!  This is no problem.

Little did I realize that nerve block can take longer than 24 hours to wear off.   Needless to say, I overdid it.  I pushed my PT exercises a little harder than I should have.  By the end of the day, my wife Colleen had to take me to the ER because my bandages had completely filled up with blood.  Luckily, no stitches were popped and a few days of doing nothing (so hard),  got me to where I am today.  The pain has subsided a bit and I am ready to head back to work tomorrow.

This recovery period, (day 5) has gotten me thinking back to when I was recovering from my hip surgery.  Gone was the excitement of realizing that the old hip pain was gone.  All I could think about was “How long will this recovery take?”  Ugh! Ugh!  Ugh!   I have caught myself in the middle of this self loathing and I’ve smiled.  It’s been 5 days and I am expecting myself to put my cape back on and save the world.  That’s when I look ahead to a year from now.  Imagining myself running a trail race with my running team,  knee pain gone, and nature all around me.  This makes me optimistic and reminds me to keep my head up.  Every day will get better and now not only will I have to listen to my hip, I will have to listen to my knee.  But I’ll still be running.  Non-runners wouldn’t understand this, and that is ok.

So now the question is, what do I do with Hiprunner.com?  Should I call it jointrunner.com?  If I do that, the site may not be legal in some states.  Hiprunner it remains.  But it is open to all Hip individuals who are dealing with joint related issues.