surgery

Advanced Surgery Center of Orlando

I’m facing another knee replacement surgery. I’ve experienced two so far, a partial on my left knee in late 2012, and a full on my right knee in early 2016.

I’ve been dealing with issues on my left knee since before I retired, but I kept putting it off hoping that when I retired and stopped the long daily commutes that the stress would lesson, and thus the problems with my left knee would somehow dissipate. It actually did at first, but then they slowly crept back. Unfortunately the bad symptoms started to reappear during the height of the pandemic; I wasn’t about to go get surgery during all of that. Now the pandemic, and specifically the pandemic lockdowns, have long since come to an end. The pain in the left knee has now increased to the point where no amount of wishful thinking combined with physical therapy will allow me to ignore it.

The practice that will be doing the work will be the same practice that performed the 2016 surgery. I much prefer that group because they perform the replacement as an out-patient procedure. That meant in 2016 I was back home the same day and recovered at my home. I much prefer home recovery if possible.

I’ll get a call this afternoon telling me when the procedure will be performed and who’ll do it. I asked for the original 2016 surgeon, but he’s booked out to November of this year, so I’ll use one of the other two orthopedic surgeons in the practice. Hopefully that means my procedure will be scheduled sooner than November.

working again (part time)

Retirement

Well… I’m working again. Both of my job leads from the first of January started to come to life, with one lead starting and then stopping and going silent, and the other finally taking off and producing work. In fact February has launched (like a rocket) with a full week’s work next week, as well as me doing prep work this week for the week to come. I’ll be so busy I won’t have the “leisure” time needed to post entries, and I probably won’t until the week after Valentine’s Day.

I’m glad to have the work and the pay that goes with it. And working by the hour, every hour spent counts and gets billed. Which means that if certain members of the group I work for decide to waste my time the way they did when I was a salaried guy, they will pay for every hour and every fraction of an hour, with all my work billed with attendant reports in exquisite technical detail as to why. After a quarter century working as a defense contractor I can CYA with the best of them.

I’m going to enjoy this burst of work next week, and not just because of the pay. It’s nice to know I’ve still got the knowledge and the skills to perform the work asked of me.