It's been anything but a routine existence in the James household since my knee replacement at the end of last August. The surgery itself was pretty much painless and testament to the wonderful surgical team lead by surgeon Melissa Rossaak at Ormiston private hospital in Auckland. Rehab has been anything but painless. Getting started with a proper rehab programme was delayed due to a shortage of public health service physios in our region so I went privately after losing patience. The rehab pain was due to the exercises to regain flexibility. It's unavoidable that these will hurt when you're pushing hard. Being grumpy and a little depressed was inevitable and massive kudos to Jennie for taking it in her stride and only telling me to pull my head in on far fewer occasions than I deserved.
After several months of flexibility exercises, it was time to graduate to cycling again. Stage one was mounting my ancient road bike in a simple resistance frame and doing lots of static pedalling in a lean-to shed attached to the house. The biggest hurdle was getting my rebuilt knee over top dead centre because of the degree of bend required but we got there with much sweat and bad language.
Pedalling fast and going nowhere
Muscle strength was markedly improving and knee stability was outstanding compared with the previous few years. In the new year, it was time to try out the e-mountain bike, albeit sticking to sealed roads for a while to gain confidence. Sitting on the e-bike in the shed for the first time revealed some ergonomic problems as the configuration was markedly different to my old road bike. Some adjustments saw a very careful first ride without too many anxious moments. Yippee!
Three or four more shortish rides and things were going well, so I booked an appointment with Bryan, my village GP for a progress chat. Bryan is a great guy and like most GP's in a rural environment with proper hospitals few and far between, he has an amazing array of skills but he's really down to earth with no pretentions. This is where the "one step backwards" in the title comes in. After expressing pleasure at the progress made, he points at the side of my knee and says, "What's that?" "It's a mole", I say - had it for at least 2 decades. Bryan was uneasy about it, made an appointment for the next day so that he could remove it and arrange a biopsy. Duly removed the next day in about 10 minutes and sent away. Result came back that it was a low grade melanoma. Heck of a shock, even though it was low grade. Bryan didn't see any point in organising a specialist hospital consultation due to potential delays through the national health service so offered to do the larger excision the following day to make sure that it was all removed. Absolutely brilliant as it stopped me brooding about it and letting the mind run wild.
The surgery session itself was a surprisingly social affair. I guess that's what happens in a village of 1600-odd people where everyone knows each other. Whilst Bryan performed the surgery, a nurse practitioner was there for routine surgical support duties and a final year med student was there to observe and suture the incision under Bryan's guidance. While this was going on, we were all chatting about wine, classic cars and fishing; accompanied by much laughter. What an incredible atmosphere to take one's mind off proceedings and an hour later, it was all done. My knee surgeon isn't going to be happy though. Her once arrow-straight incision is now crooked where the skin had to be stretched to close the latest battle scar. Just call me Frankenstein's Monster!
