Getting rocked by Hurricane Irene and knee surgery #5
August 26, 2011
Ever wonder what would be worse, recuperating from knee surgery or a hurricane? We got to do both in one wonderful weekend.
I’d been having problems for a while, noticing a clicking sound and more swelling than usual, so I went back to my surgeon over the summer. He’d sent me for an MRI and, when I went for the results, told me some startling news — that I needed to have knee surgery #5 to repair a torn meniscus. While the diagnosis was wrong (my meniscus turned out to be fine), the problems were real; he trimmed away the excess scar tissue and cartilage cells (from my implant, back in 2008) that were causing the clicking and swelling. And I went home to convalesce… and get freaked out by the weather reports.
As we sat at home on Friday afternoon, the reports grew bleaker and bleaker. The Hoboken mayor’s initial voluntary evacuation turned into mandatory evacuation on Saturday morning for all 1st floor units (which included us). So Tim packed up everything close to ground level and we gathered our valuables, including little Edie, and drove inland to Denville to stay with friends about 45 miles inland.
It poured all day and all night, but we woke up on Sunday to clear skies by late morning. We stayed in touch with a neighbor by texting to find out the power was out, and there was some flooding in Hoboken, but thankfully not by our building. The friends we stayed with lost a tree, but we were grateful it fell parallel to the house; if it had fallen in a slightly different direction, they would have lost their entire second story. By the evening, the power was back on and we drove home to find that our building was fine and our unit unharmed. We were both exhausted, and my leg was throbbing from chasing the dog around the house all weekend, but we were happy to know that it could have been a lot worse.
