I live in a house with a fair number of steps. Five or six years ago, I started making noises about wanting to move before we get too old. I want to leave, I said, before leaving is a defeat, while it can still be a victory. What I had in mind was that steps can be hard for older people. Knees deteriorate, hips deteriorate. Three of my four grandparents died before old age, so too did my mother. My father, thankfully, continues to thrive, even as he approaches 86, spending much of his year in a house with steps. Somehow, though, even five or six years ago, I intuited that steps would be a problem for me.
A year ago, for complicated reasons, I found myself living in a home with a different configuration. In my home, my bedroom and my bathroom are on the same floor. Late night, mid-50s visits to the bathroom require a shuffle of 20 feet from bed to toilet, but nothing more. Last summer, though, the house in which we were staying didn’t have a bedroom and bathroom on the same level. So two or three times a night, I would wake up, trundle down a flight of stairs, pee, and then trundle back up. And I noticed something that I hadn’t previously really allowed myself to realize. Notice is the wrong word. I became acutely aware of something I previously had been able to deny. In the middle of the night, my knees barely function. They take some warming up before they can bear the weight of my body, before they can bend.
And that was just over a year ago. In the 14 or 15 months since then, my knees have progressed to the point that it’s now quite painful for me to walk. And I will go to some lengths to avoid walking whenever possible. This might mean biking, which somehow is almost soothing for my knees.
Regardless, for about two months now, I’ve been engaged in a pretty rigorous regimen of physical therapy, trying to shore up my knees by strengthening my quads and my glutes. Unfortunately, my quads and my glutes already were pretty strong. There’s only so much that can be done away from my knees to support them. And I’ve done most of the things. My orthopedist said to me, I would tell you to lose weight, but you lost 50 pounds. I would tell you to get in shape, but you go to the gym every day. I would tell you to stop smoking, but you did that over a year ago. I would tell you to strengthen your glutes and quads, to do some physical therapy, but you’ve been doing that.
Where that leaves me, sadly, is with one option. Or rather, one non-status quo option. And the status quo increasingly simply can’t continue. So now, reluctantly, fearfully, anxiously, I’m wobbling on my shaky, weak, aching knees toward a double knee replacement.
It’s hard for me to overstate how scary this is. Yeah, I’ve heard lots of people tell me how great life is after recovery. But I’m young. I will be, by more than a decade, the youngest knee replacement recipient I’ve ever met. And while my youth bodes well for my recovery, knee replacements are not infinite in their longevity. And to a certain extent, getting a knee replacement in my 50s is a bet that I won’t be alive at the far end of my 80s. Or at least, it’s a bet that technology will have changed really dramatically, such that things become possible that today really aren’t so much. Or else, it’s trading walking today for walking in my 80s. Surely a reasonable bet.
Whatever. I’m scared and sad. I don’t want to interrupt my life for a number of weeks. I don’t want to need round-the-clock care, unable to walk even from my bed to the toilet. I don’t want to continue PT multiple times a week indefinitely. And I don’t want to continue my copious consumption of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, as well as my occasional consumption of steroids and opiates. I just want to feel better.
Featured image prompt (gemini): Dim predawn hallway, shot in desaturated documentary color on a 35mm lens at waist height, looking down a narrow corridor toward a closed bathroom door. A single low-wattage bulb casts a pool of amber on hardwood floors that show their age — worn grain, a slight bow in the boards. A flight of stairs drops away at the left edge of the frame, its banister casting a long diagonal shadow. The bathroom door is cracked an inch, a sliver of cooler fluorescent light cutting across the floor. No person. The emptiness carries the weight: the scuffed wood, the steep drop of the stair, the waiting door, the hour before anyone else is awake. The picture should feel like a house holding its breath, and like a body deciding whether it can make the trip.
Bottom image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, interior, deep night. A bare wooden staircase descends into frame from upper left, the treads lit from below by a single harsh bathroom light bleeding cold white across the bottom three steps — wrong light, too clinical, too bright against the surrounding dark. The rest of the staircase dissolves upward into blackness. On the fourth or fifth step from the bottom, a bald man in his fifties, close-cropped beard, two earrings, sits with his back mostly to camera, one hand braced on the wall beside him, weight shifted to one side — pausing mid-descent or unable to continue, the body’s negotiation with gravity visible in his posture. Shot from below and behind, wide enough that the staircase dwarfs him, his figure small and off-center in the frame. The cold white spill across the treads is too harsh, too surgical, slightly wrong in a house that should be asleep.