On Hope and Change

I am looking out at my pansies on the side deck. I have pots and pots of them in lavender and yellow and deep purple and blood red. Colors aside, what they all have in common is everything: I certainly couldn't pick one out of a police lineup should such a thing be necessary, under what circumstances one cannot even imagine but you get my point. People, however, are all different in hundreds of ways, maybe thousands, which makes comparing ourselves to others dumb, or at least fruitless.

Nevertheless, there I was last evening trolling the Internet for evidence on just how horrible or maybe really easy my upcoming hip surgery will be. I hit pay dirt on a medical website that asked patients to rate their experiences; each of perhaps a hundred respondents had the exact surgery I will be having. I settled in and started reading. About 45 minutes later my husband walked in the room and asked why I was crying.

One patient described having no pain at all following surgery, she simply felt great! Two days later she was walking on her own, no cane or anything, and she's 80! The next wrote about how his new hip failed after a couple of weeks and he needed a second surgery and he's still a mess and now it's months later and he simply doesn't know what he'll do. A third said it was the best experience of her life and she wished she had done it sooner. Another reported excruciating pain and his operated leg is now shorter than the other. This man got an infection, that lady went to a second surgeon for hip revision. Then another one......

Which one am I?, I wondered. Then I realized that I am me and the only me, and what happens to me hasn't happened yet so of course I won't know in advance since it's not written down anywhere. Pisses me off, but I guess I'll just have to let things play out and hope for the best. That's the hardest part, since as we all know thanks to Obama's last campaign, hope is a pointless exercise and change is a sure, but not always good, thing.