Clark Bell and I are joined at the hip. The Asheboro attorney and now city councilman-to-be had hip surgery just 10 days after I did. We crossed paths at the Comp Rehab offices at N.C. Baptist Hospital when I had my staples removed and he was just checking out. He'd had total hip replacement while I'd had hip resurfacing.

The other day we got back together to compare notes. I referred him to this blog so he could check out my progress reports. We got back together election night while he was celebrating and I was reporting.

"I read the blogs in progression," Clark told me. "At every juncture I said, 'This is really my experience.'"

From dealing with crutches and walkers in the first phase of recovery to putting up with support hose for the first six weeks, we could relate to one another's joys and sufferings. Being released from the hospital was a high for both of us as we found our bodies recovering quickly for the first couple of weeks. Then came the doldrums ...

I asked Clark if he'd experienced what I can only characterize as doldrums – a period of listlessness and despondency when the recovery process seems to hit a plateau. He said he had.

For both of us, this phase was typified as much as anything else by sleepless nights due to what I call "restless body syndrome."

Clark agreed that the inability to sleep for any length of time was due to tenseness, or the feeling that you have all this energy that can't be expelled. So you toss and turn and never find a comfortable position.

That, he said, was explained to him as the body's reaction to a traumatic wound. Cutting open the hip and manipulating the joint can only be interpreted by the body as something that requires all its resources to address.

Both of us were told not to drive a motor vehicle for six weeks after surgery. Having to depend on others to get places affects us in similar ways.

"Losing independence, you don't realize what you've got 'til you have to depend on others," Clark said. "It's simple things you're used to doing yourself."

He also knows what it's like to have somebody else to put on and take off the surgical hose, tugging and grunting to get the ultra-tight stockings on the feet, over the heels and up the calves. His wife Diane and my wife Ginny are our respective hose pullers-on.

And Clark agreed that even the time frame of my progression after hip surgery was similar to his own.

"It was spot on with my experience," he said.

I guess we'll be forever joined together by our right hips.



November 5, 2009