musings, life lessons & poetry from Theresa Jarosz Alberti

Tag: disability

Take a Ride on ‘The Reading’…

Discovery: you can do a lot of Reading on the Train!

Last weekend we took a four-day trip to Chicago, our first time taking an American train. We wanted a little get-away before I have my second knee replacement at the end of January, and we hadn’t been able to travel for quite awhile due to my chronic-pain-mobility circumstances. The train seemed like a good experiment, and we had a very simple itinerary to not overtask my remaining bad knee.

I admit that I’m a somewhat anxious traveler — traveling is all about having new experiences, and I can get to fretting because of the lack of certainty in traveling scenarios. However, I don’t want my fear to hold me back, so I go into research mode to learn what I can, and then try to calm down my freaky little lizard brain. Continue reading

POEM: MY BAG OF BONES

For about 18 months before my first knee surgery, I was in worsening chronic pain that greatly limited me and affected the quality of my life. It was a huge lesson for me in PAIN, what it’s really like and how much it can impact all the hours of a day. I know people who have been in pain like this for decades, people I care about, and yet I really didn’t understand it at all. I wanted to write a poem that would try to express (to the best of my ability) the nitty-gritty experience of pain. Let’s see how I did…

Dedicated to the Sufferers Continue reading

An Update, and Good News!

It’s been awhile since I did a health update. I get asked about my knees all the time when I run into people. Now I have some news, so it’s time to share.

The last posts had been on the procedures I had this last winter/spring. After months of pursuit, I finally had radiofrequency ablation done on each of my knees– a procedure where they insert three needles and burn out the nerve endings. It’s supposed to give pain relief, and for some people, it gives them a couple of years of increased mobility with a big decrease in pain. Unfortunately, for me it only gave me a little pain relief and no increase in mobility. For each procedure, I had to go through a whole painful pre-procedure to do a test of the needle locations. It was quite discouraging to not get better results from all of this.

My next plan was to go back to looking for a surgeon for knee replacement surgery. You may remember that a year ago I’d been rejected for surgery by a few surgeons because of my weight. While I understand they have concerns and that there are increased risks of infection with larger patients, I knew that I was a pretty good candidate for surgery anyway… Continue reading

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