6 Months

Wow, so I totally stopped blogging as soon as I was able to ski in March. I probably should have stuck it out a little longer since I'm now seeing all these people posing hip questions in the comments. I feel like it's pretty fortuitous that I'm coming upon this now, since a lot has changed since my last post and today is kind of a significant day.

I skied for most of March. I wasn't great, but I did alright. I think my longest ski day was 3 hours, but I went for quality, not quantity. After the first couple days, I got super-bored lapping the slow chairs Gold Link, Painter Boy, and Prospector, so I made the transition to Paradise and East River, and then quickly to lapping off the North Face T-bar on the double black terrain. Unfortunately, that all caused a massive trigger point to build up in my right thigh, leading to referred pain in my right knee. After about a month of pain, I mentioned it at PT. I guess after 8 years of constant pain, I didn't realize I needed to tell people when things started to hurt. After lots of deep tissue massage, foam rolling, and trigger point dry needling, it's mostly gone at this point, and so is the pain in my knee.

When the resort closed, I started to weigh my options. Should I have a third surgery then, or wait until September/October to get it in before the upcoming ski season. At that point, Tom and I had scheduled our wedding for September 4th, so it just made sense to take care of the surgery as soon as possible so I would be able to wear jeans again and not have to hurry back from our honeymoon to get cut open again.

The third surgery was so minor compared to the other ones. It was a huge incision (most of my six-inch scar from the Ganz), so I went under general anesthesia again. I also walked into a hospital only to wake up from a procedure unable to walk out for the third time in less than a year. But the recovery was smooth and quick. I had all six screws taken out and was walking four days later. The biggest shock to me was that the morphine they gave me in the recovery room actually took the pain away completely, rather than taking level 8-9 pain down to level 6-7 like after the first two surgeries. It took place on April 27th, exactly six months ago.

I then proceeded to crash my bike hard in the beginning of June, necessitating a trip to the ER and pretty much knocking me out for the whole summer. I was busy with working two jobs and planning a wedding, so not a lot of baking happened.

After a fabulous wedding and a great trip to Hawaii, I feel like I'm really fully on the road to recovery now. I just did squat jumps and some other jumping exercises at PT for the first time today and wow did it feel weird to jump. My entire body is exhausted, but it's certainly a good feeling. So, today is huge because it has been 6 months since my last surgery and I'm finally doing dynamic exercises for the first time in a year and a half. We're also hoping to get out and go find some backcountry pow this weekend since it has been snowing in Crested Butte for days. Hopefully my legs will have stopped shaking from this morning's workout by then!