Number Nine
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
I had my ninth orthopedic surgery in February.
I want to write that like it’s just a fact. But there’s something about the ninth time that stops feeling like a medical event and starts feeling like an ongoing conversation with your body. One you didn’t start and can’t seem to end.
The shoulder repair went well. The surgeon was good. I came home in a sling, groggy, and told myself I knew exactly what to do.
Nine surgeries gives you a certain confidence about these things.
Possibly too much confidence. My mom would probably agree.
The first few days were fine. I had the routine down: ice packs ready, meds timed, a shower chair in place, and tremendous support from my partner Jeff. I had a system.
By the end of week one, the system had opinions of its own.
I was sleeping in a recliner because lying flat sent a sharp reminder up my arm that this was not a small repair. I was waking up at 2am and reaching for my phone, not because there was anything urgent, but because lying there watching the ceiling felt worse.
I have no idea what I was looking for at 2am. Nothing good is happening on the internet at 2am. I can confirm this from extensive field research.
I couldn’t concentrate well enough to read any of the books on my nightstand.
My PT appointments started the way they always do: careful, measured, a little humbling. The exercises looked simple from the outside. They were not simple. I’d do a set, feel my shoulder scream, and have to sit in the car before heading home. Just because I needed a minute.
I kept a good face on things. In week two, I showed up to video calls with my camera on. I nodded along and hoped nobody would notice I was tracking the pain more than the conversation. When people asked how I was doing, I said, “Fine. Getting there. You know how it is.”
I did know how it was. That was the strange part.
Somewhere around week four, I hit the wall.
Not the physical one, though that was real too. This was the other wall. The one where you’ve been doing everything right and nothing feels like it’s working. There's a gap (a chasm?) between where you are and where you thought you’d be and by now it starts to feel less like a timeline and more like a verdict.
I was tired in a way that sleep didn’t touch. My thinking was slower than usual. I kept starting tasks and not finishing them. If you know me, you know that is not something I do. I’d sit down to write something and just stare at the screen.
I knew what was happening. I could name every piece of it: the lingering fog after anesthesia, the identity disruption that comes when the things that make you feel competent and capable are suddenly out of reach, the specific exhaustion of a body working very hard on your behalf, mostly without your input.
I knew all of it.
And after four weeks, I was still feeling stuck.
That’s the part that got me. Not the pain, not the slow PT progress, not even sleeping in the recliner. It was sitting there with a full understanding of what was happening and still not being able to push through it on information alone. Knowing the map is not the same as having someone walk the trail with you, and at some point, that distinction stops being abstract.
I kept thinking about friends and clients. The ones I’d seen mid-recovery, frustrated and exhausted and still doing every single rep. They’d describe their situation and I’d recognize it immediately. The push-and-crash cycle. The midnight search spiral about other people’s recovery timelines. The performance of “fine” during work calls. I understood all of it the way you understand something you’ve lived, not just read about.
Living it yourself is still different.
I was living it now. And it reminded me, forcefully, of something I already believed but hadn’t quite put words to: the gap between “cleared to return to work” and “actually yourself again” is where people often fall through the cracks. That’s the part that doesn’t get addressed. Not by the surgeon, who has done their job. Not by the PT, who is focused on specific, measurable function. Not by the discharge paperwork, which is thorough about medications and vague about everything else.
That gap is where I kept ending up. Over and over, surgery after surgery. And I realized I had spent years, without fully meaning to, building exactly the knowledge and experience to help people navigate it.
Here’s the thing about active professionals in recovery: they are not the problem. The approach is.
And when I say active professionals, I mean that specifically. These are people who have a gym they actually go to, a trail they actually run, a yoga class they actually show up for on Saturday mornings. Some of them have the muscles to prove it. They are not sedentary. Movement is part of who they are, not just something they do. And professionally, they’re carrying real weight too: a classroom, a caseload, a team, a patient load, a project. Maybe they’re a manager, a nurse, a lawyer, a teacher, an IT lead. The title varies. The pattern doesn’t: their identity is tied up in being capable and dependable, at work and in their body.
Which is exactly why recovery hits them the way it does.
These are not people who need to be motivated. They show up to PT. They do the exercises at home. They track their progress, probably on a spreadsheet, possibly color-coded. They are not slacking. They are working incredibly hard. And at some point, all that effort stops producing results and starts producing frustration.
Recovery has a funny relationship with effort. More of it does not always mean faster. The push-harder instinct that works beautifully everywhere else in life tends to backfire here. The people who do best are the ones who figure out how to stay consistent without running themselves into the ground, how to rest without feeling like they’re falling behind, and how to ask for help without treating it like a personal failure.
That last one is harder than it sounds for people who are used to being the capable one in the room.
None of this is complicated to understand. All of it is genuinely hard to do alone, when you’re tired, behind on everything, and running on whatever is left after a body that’s still knitting itself back together takes its cut.
That’s the space I work in. And it turns out nine surgeries is decent preparation for it.
Going forward, you’re going to notice a shift in what I write about here. The blog, the emails, the social posts are moving toward one specific person: the active professional who is deep in a long orthopedic recovery and can’t figure out why they’re still feeling stuck.
That person is doing their PT. They’re trying to sleep. They’re showing up to work. They’re following all the instructions. And they still feel like something is off, like they’re missing a piece of the puzzle.
I have that piece. Or at least, I have a lot of it, earned across nine surgeries, years of coaching, and long stretches of sitting in PT waiting rooms with plenty of time to think.
I’ll still work with clients on general wellness and behavior change. That hasn’t changed. But this is where my attention is pointed now. This is the problem I know best and care about most.
If you’re in the middle of a recovery that’s going slower than you expected, you’re in the right place.
And if you know someone who needs to hear that slow doesn’t mean broken, please pass this along. That person exists in your contacts. They might not be saying much about it. They rarely do.
I’ll be here.
— Laura
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