Knee surgery in the past without all that much drama

"What a week I'm having ..."

With apologies to Eugene Levy for stealing his wonderful line from "Splash," after a rough start to the week it hasn't been all that bad.


My oh-so-minor knee surgery was scheduled for Tuesday at 10:15 a.m.,  and I learned late Monday afternoon that my cardiologist had not provided the necessary cardiac clearance.

So I started scrambling and got an appointment to see the cardiologist at 8:15 a.m.

I was up before the sun, and the cardiologist -- one of my doctor's partners -- gave me the clearance with one caveat. She saids my blood pressure was high enough that they might not risk doing the surgery.


You see, 200/110 is not a good blood pressure.

It's not that the surgery itself is all that major, but the concern was that I might not do well under general anesthesia. I hadn't been able to take my blood pressure medicine and that, coupled with the stress, made for bad numbers.

Arthroscopic surgery in itself is relatively minor. They make small incisions near your kneecap and then do what they set out to do. In my case it was to remove a very small piece of torn meniscus that had broken off from the rest when I fell off a ladder and injured my knee.

I won't say I'm an old pro at all this -- just old -- but I have been under anesthesia four times in the last 12 months, three of them at this venue.

There's something great about just being wheeled into the operating room and the next thing you know, it's all done and you're in recovery. I had been told I would go home as soon as I was fully awake and there was only about a 5 percent chance I would need crutches.

I didn't.

I was given a prescription for pain pills and told I could take one or two every six hours as needed.

I'm hardly stoic about pain, but more than 48 hours after the surgery, I have taken one pill. I am essentially walking almost normally, both with and without the cane I have been using for the last few months.

Actually, most of the pain is gone and all I'm feeling is sort of an ache. Extremely bearable.

So my week was far better than Levy's.

I just thought the meme was funny.

***

It's still more than a month until the official end of winter, but with teams reporting for Spring Training this week, things are definitely looking up.

Things used to be different. Players spent their offseasons working other jobs, since the money they made playing ball wasn't all that great. Even in the late '60s, the minimum annual salary for a major leaguer was less than $10,000.

With that in mind, many players showed up in Florida and Arizona needing to lose weight and get into shape for the season.

Now, with the annual minimum north of $560,000, staying in shape is a year-round thing.

As recently as the 1960s, there were ballplayers who also played in the NBA in the winter. Perhaps the most famous was Dave DeBusschere, who was a starter on both New York Knicks championship teams.

But he wasn't as good as Hornsby.

Few were.