To your Health!

 I have a date for my knee replacement: October 21st. It's a relief to have a date so that I know when I can accept work but I feel like it's a count down, all the same.  Not the cool, exciting count down that comes before a special trip, more of a mild panic, can-I-get-things-done kind of count down. Last week, I celebrated my 70th birthday with a trip to the walk-in clinic. I had a hacking cough which had started a couple of days earlier. Since I tested negative for Covid, I would normally have self-medicated and waited it out. But now there was the deadline of my pre-op doctor visit! A friend recently got as far as the hospital on knee-replacement day, only to be turned away because she was sick. Talk about a nightmare, after all the mental preparation!

When I saw the walk-in doctor, he said he would normally take a wait-and-see approach, but since I was having an operation soon, he gave me a chest x-ray and a course of antibiotics! Happily, the antibiotics worked quickly and I am pretty much back to normal. It was all a little unsettling because, despite my creaky joints, my health is generally pretty good. 

I have been working my way through a lot of Rick's old family photos, some dating back to the Civil War. As I saved them in my Forever account, I did some light genealogy research so that I could place the relationships. One thing I noticed was the number of remarriages, due to death of a spouse. People died a lot, and they died young, of things like pneumonia and flu, accidents, heart disease and other ailments that rarely prove fatal today. When a man with young children lost his wife, he went looking for a replacement to provide a mother for his children. When a woman's husband died, she often remarried for security, since women had little status and less money. It got me thinking about life expectancy and the options we have now that we should be much more grateful for. 

It is fashionable in some quarters to claim that vaccinations are bad for you. It has been long enough, perhaps, that many do not remember how much worse the diseases were. As someone old enough to have suffered from Measles, Mumps and Rubella (German Measles) as a child, I was very happy to give my children the chance to miss out on the "fun".  I don't remember how sick I was (very sick, by all accounts, especially with Measles) but I remember being furious that I had both Measles and Mumps over Christmas in different years and I had German Measles during summer vacation. I didn't even get to miss any school!  

So, while not looking forward to having an operation, I am grateful that the option exists. I had my pre-op doctor visit today, and I passed all the tests with flying colors, so the way is clear to get my new knee. At 70 years old, I have a lot to look forward to!