Preop emotions

You can prepare your home and still not be prepared. Here's what actually helps.I remember sitting in my living room a few weeks before my first knee replacement looking at everything I had gotten ready for surgery.The toilet riser. The grabber. The ice packs. The pillows stacked in all the right places.I felt ready.And then my husband walked in and asked what I was doing. I was in the middle of going through years-old receipts. And I just broke down.The weight of everything seemed to hit all at once. I wasn’t going to get everything done. I felt like I was prepared but not.It turns out you can be completely prepared logistically and still feel an unsettling, quiet fear that you can't quite name.

Five mindset shifts that helped me move out of fear and into controlHow can we not have fear of the unknown through our knee replacements, right?It’s so crazy, because I caught myself constantly telling myself how scared I was of my knee replacement. And it wasn’t until I stopped saying I’m scared and started identifying what it was that scared me so much that I could get curious about why it was bothering me.This was a process. It took me a while to slow down enough to really identify what I was most afraid of. What I noticed was that if I just kept telling myself, I’m scared, I’m scared, the fear kept coming back. Over and over.

You know that panicky, can’t-think-straight feeling that creeps in before surgery?Or when you’re in recovery and your brain just won’t quit spinning?That’s not weakness. That’s your body trying to protect you.Before my first knee replacement, I don’t think I slept more than a couple hours at a time. My brain was in overdrive running through the same questions on repeat: Do I have everything ready? Am I missing something? Did I plan the meals? Will the house still run without me?I was the Jill-of-all-trades in our home—planning, cooking, cleaning, remembering every little detail—so handing over control for a while was brutal.