My surgery went really well. At least that’s what one of the team of doctors told me the day after I had hip resurfacing. He also said my arthritis had been pretty bad. No wonder I had hurt so much in my right hip.

The surgery on my hip, led by Riyaz Jinnah, is called Birmingham hip resurfacing. Dr. Jinnah trained for the procedure in England and has done hundreds. The operation is an alternative to total hip replacement, in which the femur head is removed and replaced with a metal hemisphere. With resurfacing, the femur head is left pretty much intact and the metal is placed over it. The socket area is also covered with a metal piece and the two fit together perfectly. That’s why I tell everyone that it’s better to have metal against metal than bone against bone.

After resurfacing, the patient can eventually do everything he or she was able to do before surgery. For me, that means a return to running next spring.

I went to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center for the procedure. Tuesday morning I checked in with my wife Ginny at my side. My name was called at about 7:30 or so and I was taken to a cubicle off the operating room to change into a hospital gown and to be hooked up with an IV needle. A nurse named Melissa did the honors.

Before I left the cubicle, I received anesthesia. An hour or two later, I awoke in the recovery room. After the medical personnel were satisfied my vital signs were OK, I was wheeled to Room 204 in the Sticht Center. Soon Ginny, our youngest daughter Laura and grandson Cody came in, toting my suitcase, my hip kit, a pair of crutches and a walker.

The first (and only) night I spent there, I was assisted by the night nurse, Deborah. We spent the graveyard shift trying to get my blood pressure out of the bottomless pit. She told me that a side effect of the morphine is low blood pressure. So low for me, in fact, that at one point the high number was a lowly 60-something.

Deborah kept the IV filled with saline solution to get me back to some semblance of a living organism. Finally, she was allowed to transfuse me with a pint of blood, and that seemed to do the trick. When the top number finally went over 100, I couldn’t help but note that I’d made it to triple digits. Sometime during the night, Deborah assured me that I’d be better the next day.

Karen took over for Deborah after daylight. She continued to monitor my vitals, got me up to use the bathroom and scrubbed my back during my sponge bath. I took my turn, cleansing my chest and abdomen.

Wednesday afternoon I started therapy. Ashleigh made sure I could correctly use the crutches and the walker. I made my way from my room, around by the nurses’ station and back to my room.

Then Jennifer, the occupational therapist, quizzed me on the use of my hip kit. The kit contains a long-handled shoehorn, a long-handled scrub sponge, a device for putting on socks and a picker-upper -- a long piece of metal with a handle and trigger on one end and a claw-like finger at the other end.

Jennifer, who I like to call the drill sergeant, showed me how to put on and remove my pants, how to put on and remove my socks and other neat tricks that I really could have used over the past year. The long-handled picker-upper, she said, will be my best friend while I recover.

During supper, my oldest daughter, Michelle, and her two kids, Mariah and Chance, came to visit. By that time, I’d been told I could either go home or spend another night in the hospital. I chose the former and picked Michelle to drive me home.

But since Michelle had to get up at 3:15 the next morning to go to work, she'd arranged for our middle daughter, Angela, to meet us at Michelle’s home in Archdale to pick me up for the leg home.

First, though, I had to have another X-ray before leaving. We had to wait about an hour for the patient transfer team to arrive with my wheelchair.

I hopped aboard and was swiftly wheeled way, way over to another zip code to Radiology.

I posed for three pix before remounting my wheelchair for the return trip.

When I got back to the room, we hurriedly got my stuff and headed downstairs to Michelle’s car.

We were well on our way down I-40 when I realized I couldn’t find the prescriptions the doctor wrote for me. Michelle called the nurses’ station on her cell phone and soon learned that the prescriptions had indeed been left in my room in our rush to get on the road.

When I went up to the front desk, Deborah handed me the prescriptions with a smile, saying, “Didn’t I tell you you’d be lot better today?”

The drive to Archdale, the switchover to Angela’s car and the ride home seemed uneventful. That is, until later Wednesday night when I realized that my hip kit was nowhere to be seen.

Fortunately, Angela found the kit on her backseat, thus reuniting me with my “best friend.”

Tomorrow: The Road to Ruined Hip Joints