The Absent Uncle: ‘It’ll get tougher’

I was recently talking with one of my nieces about a variety of subjects, but one of which was her recovery from knee surgery a little over a year ago. 

She lives about 20 minutes away from me here in the Houston area, and I had signed on to assist her for the surgery to and from transportation and the subsequent recovery. With this in the rear view mirror our memories of the events can be looked at with a lot more humor now than she exhibited in pain of her recovery. Nothing was funny then. 

My favorite story is from the drive home after the surgery.   

Surgery was over by 10 a.m. By 1 p.m. she was up and walking the hospital hallways with a walker and feeling pretty spry. 

She was discharged around 2 p.m. and on the drive home she was insistent that we go to dinner that night with some friends of hers to celebrate the successful surgery.

I told her in no uncertain terms that we were not going out to dinner, regardless of how “good” she felt. I was fairly certain that the powerful drugs from the surgery were doing the talking at that point and we needed to make sure she was following the recovery plan laid out by her doctor. 

During that ride I reminded her of her grandfather’s – my dad – favorite saying: “It’ll get tougher”. 

And tougher it got. 

I was never a great admirer of that phrase. It seemed so pessimistic, however, as I get older, I understand what he was saying – it does get tougher.   

My niece and I rode out the short-term recovery time together. We had a good time talking, debating about her medication schedule (I wrote everything down to document the every-four-hour or whatever pain killer last taken was), and just generally being family, taking care of her needs. 

She worked hard in her physical therapy and after a week, I was relieved of care giving. She was on her own.   

But when we spoke today – a year later – we both agreed with dad, “It’ll get tougher”.