We have been procrastinating on this for over a year, so it would be wrong to say it was ONLY because of the impending tariffs—but last summer we had two cars for six drivers, and that was not great, especially if we expect the kids to work summer jobs, which we do; so we’ve been meaning to buy a third car, but haven’t been doing it, and I’ve been feeling increasingly anxious about it, ESPECIALLY with the impending tariffs. And also because one of our two cars is 15 years old with nearing 150,000 miles on it, and that is the sort of situation where one sudden bright day there is a repair that costs more than the car is worth. So if anything we should be adding TWO cars.

Then one evening last week, I suddenly felt a little lift of motivation and capability. I have learned to SEIZE these moments when they occur, but it was like 9:00 at night, so I had to wait to see if it would still be there in the morning, and it WAS, and I went out and bought a used car. It’s a Subaru Outback, with roughly 45,000 miles on it. I went to work the next day and my co-worker who has a Subaru Outback spent like 15 minutes telling me everything that has gone wrong with hers. I HAVE ALREADY SIGNED THE PAPERWORK AND INFORMED MY INSURANCE, IT IS TOO LATE TO TELL ME THESE THINGS.

And anyway, I am already fond of the car. (You might think I would be someone who would give cars names, but I don’t. I do talk to them, and pat them lovingly, and thank them, and reassure them.) I test-drove a Crosstrek, which is what my heart originally wanted, and an Outback, which is what the salesperson knew right away I would end up choosing. The Crosstrek is adorable, and I am not a small person, and we are still regularly transporting things to and from college dorm rooms. The Outback is less cute, but gave me some of the feeling of my beloved Toyota Sienna minivan, which we bought used when I was pregnant with the twins; the Outback isn’t a minivan and doesn’t have a third row of seating, but it felt similar to drive.

The color is grey, which was not at the top of my list and not at the bottom. It’s fine. And the thing is, I always THINK I want a fun color, but what I ACTUALLY want is to blend in, and not have other people be able to tell at a glance that it’s my car. I bought cute license-plate frames, and I put on an equality sticker; I will add more stickers when I’ve decided what I want. It seems like we’re not doing bees-as-symbols-of-resistance this time around, is that your impression as well?

And can we share notes on what else we are supposed to be buying ahead of tariffs and other economic collapses? I have heard mostly coffee and baking chocolate and spices and vanilla.

Okay. Okay. I call uncle: I need some pajama-like pants that I can wear in the daytime, in public.

Even back in December/January with knee surgery and physical therapy looming, I thought I could get by with my patterned flannel pajama pants: it’s short-term! no sense buying special/new clothes when my Christmas Dogs pj pants will do just fine! I can tolerate looking a little silly in a medical situation!

But it’s been three and a half months, and today I had an MRI for my knee (because it’s been over three weeks since I fell on it, and it is still swollen/stiff/sore), and they wanted me to wear soft pants with no zipper, and apparently I have hit my own personal limit for Christmas Dogs pj pants in public. I mean, I did wear the Christmas Dogs pj pants. BUT I WISHED FOR SOMETHING BETTER.

I have a pair of pants a friend gave me, stretchy and black and perfect with pockets, as a surgery-recovery gift—but they were originally one size below what I normally wear (though, bless them, they still worked at the time), and I have gained about 15 pounds since then (she remarked with absolute neutrality, and with no moral value assigned), so now they are a literal and figurative stretch. I looked into buying the same ones in a bigger size—but as seems to be the case with all such quests, the pants have been discontinued.

I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I’d thought I would look All Wrong in basic tight-all-the-way-down stretch pants, so I bought some boot-cut yoga pants, and I felt as if I would FAR rather wear the Christmas Dogs. Specifically they looked wrong with my SHOES, which are either Converse or Skechers. But I didn’t know what kind of shoes WOULD look right with those pants. They made me feel as if I looked ridiculous, so I sent them back to hell where they belonged.

So I guess I am asking: what comfy stretchy non-jeans no-zipper pants OF ANY TYPE (BUT THEY MUST MUST MUST HAVE GOOD POCKETS OR THEY ARE USELESS AS DAYTIME PANTS) do you feel okay wearing in public? And then I will go look at all your suggestions and see if anything resonates. Love you byeeeeeeee!

Shortly after I wrote to you about my little knee setback, in which I fell on my surgical knee and needed seven stitches, three x-rays, and a tetanus shot, and found myself feeling discouraged, fragile, and old, I came down with a cold. For the first five days or so, it was the kind of cold that sounds bad but feels fine. Then it turned into the kind of cold where I went to Urgent Care because it was hard to swallow and seemed like my body was trying to cough up my esophagus, but unfortunately it is not strep or pneumonia or anything else that can be treated; instead it is just a virus, and I can try saltwater gargles, extra liquids, and plenty rest. Meanwhile at night I am thinking things like “I can see how people die of respiratory viruses,” followed by a little flutter of hope.

This, combined with the significant knee-recovery setback, combined with the absolutely execrable U.S. government and its daily doses of excrement, has led me into a bit of a Misery Era. I suggest we don’t talk about me any further than that, not even to the point of sympathetic comments in the comments section; you have already been so kind to me, and I continue to coast on the residuals. Instead, I would like to offer you a place to talk about the things making you miserable right now—few or many, small or medium or large. I think there is a time for gratitude journals and counting blessings and doing what we can with what we have, and there is a time for bonding through restorative complaining.

I have had a little Knee Setback. (Is this now a Knee Blog? Will there ever be a day when we talk about anything other than The Knee?) Today I am 11 weeks post-surgery, and yesterday I did one of the only things the surgeon told me not to do, which was to fall on the knee. I can’t even quite say how it happened, because to me it seemed like I was just suddenly hitting the hardwood floor, first with the knee, then with my cheekbone. There was that Bad Feeling of when something theoretically avoidable has happened and you can’t undo it and now there are going to be a long series of consequences—like when a child barfs in the car, or when you drop a full cup of cranberry juice and it goes EVERYWHERE. Plus I was a little stunned. What just happened? Did I not even try to catch myself with my hands? (This morning there was a big bruise on the outer/back edge of my left hand.) I do fall relatively often for an adult, but I don’t think I have hit my FACE in a fall since childhood.

William was home, and called out from the other room “Are you okay?,” and I said that I was, but that I had fallen. I got up, thinking about how the surgeon had said that if I fell, I should go to the ER to have the knee checked out. I wondered if that still applied 11 weeks later, or if that was just for the immediate post-surgical time. As I wondered that, I noticed my pant leg was wet. I have fallen many, many, MANY times in my life, and I have skinned many a knee, and there has never been this much blood this quickly. There was a cut across the top of the knee, perpendicular to the incision scar. The pants I was wearing were not torn or damaged. I still don’t know how/why the cut happened.

I had just made some lunch, after being away from the house for six hours for work and for physical therapy, and I was also feeling stunned and dismayed and embarrassed and very uncertain what to do, so I took a big chunk of folded paper towels and pressed it against my knee, and propped my leg up on a chair, and said that the plan was to eat my lunch while the bleeding stopped, after which I would call the surgeon’s office and find out if I was seriously supposed to go to the ER for this.

I ate about a quarter of my lunch but I’d lost my appetite. And the bleeding was not stopping. William was nervous and asking if he should drive me to the ER. I thought I could drive myself, until I stood up and the bleeding was much worse. So he drove me to the emergency room. There must be a button they can push at reception for a bleeder, because someone from triage came right out, asked me good-naturedly if I was bleeding on her carpet, and put a 2-inch-thick pile of gauze on my knee and wrapped it with that stretchy elastic stuff that sticks to itself but not to your skin. I am not exaggerating how thick the stack of gauze was.

She then brought me right into triage as soon as I was done checking in, which made me think they were not busy, but I was wrong: this was my first visit to the ER where I spent the whole time in the hallway because every room was full. Because my situation was NOT dire and I was NOT miserable, this was splendid: I got to hear lots of interesting little tidbits about other people and their situations. I was right between TWO nurse telephones, so I heard them describing all sorts of things to their colleagues in this and other hospitals. I was in a cluster of four hallway patients, so I heard their nurses/doctors talking to them about what their issues were. More patients were escorted by police officers than I’d expected. I played on my phone and tried to act like I wasn’t listening.

A nurse brought me an ice pack and a blanket. A PA (physician’s assistant) came by to ask me what brought me here today, and I told her, and she said the plan was (1) x-rays; (2) waiting for a radiologist to assess the x-rays; (3) stitches; (4) possibly a tetanus shot, if my records showed it had been awhile since my last tetanus shot. And those are the four things we did. It took about four hours.

I had never had stitches while awake before. Oh, I guess I had them after my c-sections, but at the time I could not feel a single thing below my ribs so those don’t count. The PA said the worse part would be the three lidocaine shots I’d have before the stitching, and she said those WOULD hurt quite a bit going in—but happily those were done on the part of my knee that is still numb from the knee surgery! I hardly felt them! The stitching itself was conceptually icky, but not painful; I got 7 stitches, which is a pleasing number. The tetanus shot was pretty painful as arm-shots go, but was over quickly and then didn’t keep hurting, though my arm is somewhat sore today.

I had thought that the stitches would pretty much put an end to the bleeding, but that was not the case. I’d thought that once I’d gone to bed and woken up in the morning, THEN the bleeding would have stopped, and that seemed to be the case, but then I went to work and that definitely made things worse, and I left after a couple of hours when the thick bandage failed to be sufficient. I am now trying more advanced resting, to see if I can make it stop, and I think it has mostly worked, but I also think it’s a difficult location for that. My knee is pretty swollen again now, and purple again. There are unpleasant intermittent burning/stinging/zinging sensations on my skin, not where the stitches are but on other parts of the knee.

I am trying not to worry about literally everything about this. I am trying not to project doom into the future (“I guess I am going to be the kind of old person who lightly jostles against a chair and ends up covered in bruises”/”Maybe these are the first indications of what will turn out to be a blood-clotting disorder”/”Is my skin weirdly fragile and breakable now?”/”I am going to be put in A Home so much earlier because of this falling thing”). My whole leg was purple and swollen after the knee surgery, to the point where the visiting home physical therapist was quietly alarmed and got on the phone to the surgeon’s office, and the surgeon was just like “Yep, that happens sometimes,” and indeed the purple gradually cleared itself away. Probably I should take one of my leftover painkillers (NO I did not get rid of them responsibly) and try not to think about it.

Oh! And I should say that the x-rays showed the new $58,000 knee (our co-pay was $180) was just fine. Everything where it should be, no sign of injury or misalignment. “Unremarkable left knee,” was the conclusion. I am trying not to imagine that my knee feels weird or that I’m walking weird or that things are hitching a little with each step (“Maybe I slammed something out of alignment and now it will have to be taken out and replaced”/”Maybe the surgeon will have to do another surgery to adjust it”/”Maybe he will need to adjust it from the outside and it will be very painful and icky”).

In a pleasing pairing, I found two unrelated lost things on the same day. The first and most important was a favorite and irreplaceable Old Navy zip-up hoodie, navy blue, with red/orange/yellow/lavender/white stripes at the elbows, lost for half a year or so. I noticed almost right away that it was gone, and could not fathom it not being in any of the places it could possibly be, and so I imagined I must have somehow left it behind in some coffee shop or whatnot, even though that is Not Like Me. When I was a child, my mother left her purse behind on SO MANY MEMORABLE OCCASIONS (multiple times on LONG ROAD TRIPS, necessitating LONG TURN-AROUNDS), I grew up to habitually/reflexively check where I was sitting before I leave a place. (My mother now habitually wears a fanny-pack…which she will still unclip and leave behind.) But the hoodie was nowhere, so I MUST have somehow left it somewhere. Fall turned to winter which turned to almost-spring, and I got out the light jacket I wear for about two weeks each spring and two weeks each fall—and the hoodie was inside it, completely concealed. The joy! I cannot express. I have worn it every day since, with tears in my eyes and stripes at my elbows.

The second thing, which I am deliberately putting second for the sake of levity, was a Sour Patch watermelon candy I dropped in the car when we were taking the twins back to college after spring break. It fell out of my fingers and vanished into, apparently, the ether. It was nowhere. It was completely unimportant, except that it made me feel as if I had lost my mind. Then, yesterday, finishing off a bag of snack-size Kit Kat bars, I found the Sour Patch watermelon candy in the bottom of the bag. Almost as exhilarating as finding the hoodie, in its own special way.

There was a work meeting, at which my fear was realized that we lowest-paid-no-benefits workers would be asked to divvy up the duties of our former well-paid-with-benefits supervisor who also had a title and a seat at the department-head table. I got to almost the end of the two-hour meeting without finding a moment to say my piece, and I was afraid I was going to whiff it for lack of opportunity. Then a co-worker absolutely teed me up, and I seized the moment and said my thing—and, encountering pushback from boss and boss’s boss, managed to RE-ASSERT my thing, WITHOUT CRYING. Afterward half a dozen coworkers separately approached me and thanked me for saying what I said. A triumph! even if it results in nothing! because at least I SAID IT, and my peers HEARD IT, and also I would be FAR MORE UPSET AND AGITATED if I had NOT said it! …Except, my brain and body are treating this as a disaster. The situation loops back into my mind every few minutes, each time with a little surge of “SOMETHING WENT WRONG AND WE NEED TO ENDLESSLY DISSECT IT!!!” adrenaline.

The U.S. news has been an absolute barrage of disaster and trauma. What are we to do. I have been wondering if our senators were up to the task of removing a dictator, and instead most of them are falling down at the first, easiest hurdles. There is some good news in rulings from federal judges—but the administration is so far ignoring those judges, so now we wait to see if the center can hold or if all is lost.

I started back with my regular work schedule the same week we put the clocks forward, and in retrospect that was not a great plan. I am so, so tired. I’m doing okay, but I am so tired. I am eating a lot of sugar. (And protein! I know to eat plenty of protein! But also really a lot of sugar.)

Tomorrow I will be nine weeks post-knee-replacement-surgery. It turns out that post-surgical status, like pregnancy and the age of new babies, is counted in weeks, but I don’t know how long we keep doing that. The physical therapist is still counting it in weeks; I saw the surgeon last week and he was still counting it in weeks. (But I wish to avoid being the knee-parent who says their knee-baby is 37 weeks old.)

Although, interestingly/irritatingly, when I saw the surgeon I was one day shy of 8 weeks, and he said I was 6-7 weeks. I was not inclined to keep arguing the point, but what happened is he came into the room and said “So let’s see, you’re about 6 weeks post-surgery?,” and I said “8 weeks tomorrow!,” and he said, “No, the surgery was January 9th [the surgery was in fact January 7th], so you’re 6-7 weeks.” Okay! I mean, even if the surgery had been January 9th, which it wasn’t, I would have been 7 weeks 4 days, but I’d already corrected him once. He took a little video of me straightening the knee and bending it, and walking a few steps, and his voice recording on that video said I was 6-7 weeks, but I was actually nearly 8 weeks. Then he had me bend my knee, and he measured it before I was ready, and he said it was 124 degrees, but I’ve been consistently bending it 134-136 degrees in physical therapy, and ONCE even got it to 140 degrees.

I complained richly to the physical therapist about all this, and she said my surgeon has a wonderful reputation for his work in the operating room, but not so much otherwise. Which we both agreed is the way we’d prefer to have it, if our surgeon can only have a wonderful reputation in one area. BUT I WAS ONE DAY SHY OF 8 WEEKS, NOT 6-7 WEEKS. She also said that what he was looking for was that I could bend it at least 120 degrees, since that was the 6-7-week goal, so he probably didn’t even find it relevant that I could bend it more. She measured it for me, even though she hadn’t been planning to do so on that particular visit, just so we could both look at the 136 degrees and feel a little huffy about it.

I have done three 2-hour shifts back at work now, and it’s going fine. Two hours is pretty much perfect: by the end of it, I am sore and tired and my knee is going pang! pang! pang! But it feels (and is) like doing physical therapy precisely fine-tuned to exactly what I need to work on for my job. Then I come home and ice the knee and feel dazed for awhile.

I’m 7.5 weeks post-surgery now. About a week ago, the physical therapist did an overhaul of my at-home exercises, cutting them back significantly. At the peak of home exercise, I was doing an hour of exercise three times a day. After the first few weeks, it turned into twice a day, one session of an hour and a half and one session more like 45 minutes to an hour. My newly-pared-down at-home exercises are less than an hour once a day, with an optional second session of about 15 minutes (mostly stretches).

What’s weird is, it actually feels more burdensome now. I think because when it was an hour three times a day, I felt like this was just my job/life right now. I eat; I take medications; I exercise; I ice the knee; I eat; I take medications; I exercise; I ice the knee. I was in pajamas and slippers all day, so it wasn’t a big deal to switch from not-exercising to exercising. Now that I’m going back to work a little, and sometimes doing an errand or a chore, and sometimes wearing shoes and Daytime Pants, it feels like a big imposition to have to exercise for AN HOUR just for A KNEE. I have to CHANGE PANTS to do it, which for me is one of those hurdles I realize shouldn’t be such a huge hurdle (it takes, what, 45 seconds?) but it IS.

This feels like something that might be specific only to me, but in case you are reading this in the context of surgery of your own and it might be true of you as well, I will mention it. For about a month after surgery, I found that I had to be careful with sugar because it would quickly make me queasy. I might have a little bowl of ice cream, but only after a good-sized meal, and even then I might feel sorry. But starting about six weeks after surgery, I have had some INTENSE sugar cravings—that feeling of Almost Not Being Able To Get Enough Sugar. Which, yes, does lead to queasiness too, but it’s a lot more sugar. A small or medium amount of sugar doesn’t make me feel queasy anymore, if I stop after a small or medium amount of sugar, which is currently rare. And I should clarify that I have ALWAYS been someone who very much enjoys sugar, so I am saying that this is a sugar drive that noticeably exceeds my usual generous capacity. “My goodness,” I think to myself, viewing the wrappers in the aftermath.

I’m starting back to work tomorrow, just two hours at a time for now; this was the physical therapist’s suggestion. She says she thinks a good long on-ramp is a good idea, to give the knee time to adjust, and because stamina can be very reduced; and because there may be job-related tasks I can’t do or have trouble doing, and in that case we can work on those in physical therapy, but not if I’m too tired/sore/busy from doing too much. AND: the movement at work can be good for the knee at this point, and good for getting it strengthened in the ways it needs to be strengthened.

I’m nervous about it. It’s been seven weeks since I’ve been there, and there have been some of the kinds of management shake-ups that are boring to tell but destabilizing/upsetting to those of us who work there. When I emailed that I could come back, my boss called me LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES LATER and talked excitedly for OVER HALF AN HOUR; she sounds very…wound up…about everything. I’d said in my email that the physical therapist recommended coming back for short shifts at low-pressure times, and it sounded to me as if my boss had not read anything except the part about coming back to work, and after half an hour on the phone (paid time for her, unpaid for me), hearing about how they still haven’t figured out how to cover the shifts that became uncovered six weeks ago (at the time I thought, “How nice that this will all be resolved by the time I get back, without them being able to use ME to resolve it”), and all the new things she wants to show me how to do (when I am already stretched far too thin at that job), and all the help they need on desk (when I am supposed to be shelving), I felt like I was already burned out before stepping foot on the premises.

At times like this, it helps me to remember that no one is forcing me to do this job. I can actually leave. Even if I don’t WANT to leave, OR think it will come to that, it still helps to remember that I CAN: it removes the element of panic. WHAT IF I GO BACK, AND IT’S EVERYTHING I FEAR, AND THEY GIVE ME EVEN MORE RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT ANY CORRESPONDING INCREASE IN PAY, AND I AM STRETCHED SO THIN I END UP HATING THE JOB I USED TO LOVE, AND I CAN’T MAKE MYSELF HEARD ON THAT TOPIC, WHAT THEN????? Well, then I hand in my notice, that’s what. I leeeeeeeeave. I go get ANOTHER low-paying entry-level no-benefits job that will gradually become intolerable, and I continue that pattern until I retire.

Also at times like this, it helps me to remember all the times like this when I have been suffused with weariness and dread and exit plans beforehand, and then I get to the thing I was suffused about and it’s fine. GOOD, even. In this particular case, people are going to be happy to see me, and I am going to be happy to see them, and I’m going to bring in a big box of doughnut holes for all of us happy people. People are also going to be RELIEVED to see me: my knee surgery, which I carefully scheduled to avoid the holiday-time-off season and the spring-break-time-off season, accidentally corresponded exactly with the destabilizing shake-ups and some serious staffing shortages. I don’t have to worry that I’m not as fast or capable as I was, because anything I can do will still make less work for other people.

If you sleep on your back, either always or sometimes, I have a question for you: WHAT do you do with your FEET?

I NEVER sleep on my back, except now, post-knee-surgery, when I do it almost all the time because every other position hurts more. But I do not know what to do with my feet! My natural inclination is to have them basically as if I were standing, except that I’ve been tipped onto my back: not QUITE like that, since they tend to lightly relax forward, but basically toes pointing to ceiling. But then my feet are making a little tent of the blankets, and the blankets are too heavy for that to be comfortable.

I can let them relax more forward, so that the tops of my feet take the weight of the blankets, but that too feels uncomfortable, and as if I’m doing a stretch on purpose. I can let them flop to the sides, or toward each other, but that doesn’t really work with the knee; the knee wishes the entire leg to be in line. I’m not sure it would work even without the knee bossing me around; this is probably part of why I am mostly a side sleeper. I think for me to sleep comfortably on my back, I would need to have my feet out from under the covers, and then of course we’re talking about monsters getting them.

If you sleep on your back, what are your feet doing?

[Edited to add: I am getting bolster/pillow-under-the-knees suggestions, which is an EXCELLENT idea but the knee surgeon says I am not allowed to do that right now. Feet/legs can be propped so that legs are angled-but-still-straight, but knees may not rest in a bent position.]