after the surgery

      It’s the age of surgeries—knee replacements, cataract repairs, artificial hips, inserted stents. But it’s not just the surgery itself, of course. At a certain age, it’s just as much about the recovery from the surgery.

      A little more than a month ago, I had surgery for an inguinal hernia. It was elective, which meant that it was my choice to do it at that moment—no doctor was pushing it, no medical necessity required it. But the hernia had been bothering me, off and on, for some time, and I just wanted to be done with it.

      I had forgotten, however, that you’re not done with it when you leave the operating room. You are not done with it until some time well after the surgeon puts away the scalpel. 

      My procedure itself took just a little more than two hours. It was out-patient surgery, which probably means insurance wouldn’t pay for an in-patient hospital stay. (In France, where I had the same surgery several decades ago while I was covered by French health insurance, they let me stay for eight days, although the operation had gone perfectly well. Plus, they even served wine with each hospital meal. Gotta love the French healthcare system.)

      My surgery this time was done robotically, without wine but with a laparoscope, a thin, lighted tube that has a video camera attached. The laparoscope is put into a tiny incision in your belly. Then long, narrow instruments or trocars are inserted through the incision to manipulate, cut and suture tissues. While one surgeon works the remote, peering at the camera’s images, another is by the operating table overseeing the manipulation. Yeah, modern medicine truly is remarkable. 

      Also remarkable is that two hours or so after the trocars were removed and the incisions closed up, with self-healing stitches and surgical glue, I was in the car headed back home, no bandages anywhere. 

      Still, despite all the talk of “minimally invasive,” for several days I had almost no energy and needed to nap frequently. I attributed it to the after-effects of the general anesthesia. But a friend, who had worked as a nurse for decades, said it wasn’t just the anesthesia. Having surgery, having your body cut open, is like getting really beaten up, she said. Your body has been traumatized, and when your body is older, the trauma is deeper and lasts longer.

      Friends with knee replacements have been thrilled to have new joints, but were less thrilled with the weeks of excruciating exercises needed to make the new knees fully operational. A friend who had his hip replaced recently first had to use a walker and then a cane, but said he was almost fine now, basically back to his old self. That was, however, an almost full year since his surgery.

      Even friends who have had the simple, common procedure of cataract surgery have talked about needing time to adjust to the new brightness and having to remember about regularly switching to reading glasses.

      After my surgery, I couldn’t drive for a week or two, until the time where sudden braking wouldn’t jam the seatbelt into my abdomen. In the beginning, I couldn’t twist around to get something out of the cupboard, because that might stretch the stitches. I could walk, slowly, but I couldn’t run, because running might put a little too much strain on the surgery site.

      I was not supposed to lift anything heavier than 12 or 15 pounds for a month and a half. No working out in the gym yet. No even hoisting the laundry basket when it’s filled with dirty clothes (my wife weighed it: with laundry, it’s about 14 pounds; too heavy). And the site where the incision was is still a tiny bit swollen and I still have the occasional twinge, a sudden sharp reminder of what had been done.

      According to the surgeon, full recovery—that is, becoming once again the person I was before the surgery—was supposed to take six weeks. Or so. No guarantees.

      Friends of the same age who have recently had the same surgery, say, nah, it’s more like seven weeks or it could be eight weeks or maybe longer.

      When you get older, they all say, the body heals more slowly, even if it’s only from a laparoscope and a couple of small incisions.