Knee Replacement 15: Ice, Ice, Baby

Ice brackets my days. I start every morning with a dunk in an ice bath and end every day with knees swaddled in ice packs. Sometimes small cubes of ice float in a glass, melting the last vestiges of the day’s angst. But now, eight weeks after knee surgery number two, I decide it’s time to add even more ice to my recovery plan: an exploratory spin on the hockey rink.

I wasn’t going rogue with this decision. I had asked my surgeon if it would be safe for me to skate. He gave me the green light, with provisions: don’t actually play hockey yet, don’t make fast cuts and direction changes, but do have fun.

It will be good for you, he said. We want to get you back to the things you love to do as soon as possible.

I’m not sure any other orthopod would set me free to ruin their good work with a risky spin on the ice this soon after surgery, but I think it’s safe to say that other doctors hadn’t spent their lives on ice and won five gold medals for skating with great alacrity across it as Dr. Eric Heiden had.

So, yeah, let’s just say that I knew that the odds were in my favor for a positive response.

I pulled my big hockey bag out the night before and packed a smaller bag with a coach’s jacket, sweatpants, a helmet, skates, and gloves. The basic coach’s costume. Into the bag I also stuffed a pair of moto knee pads (Nitro Circus founder Travis Pastrana’s TP199) which hug my knees better than hockey shinpads and have something called Reactive Memory Foam that’s soft and pliable but still hardens upon impact. That’s what the website says anyway.

With my bag packed for tomorrow, I stop at the freezer, grab four ice packs, and head for the living room, where I flick on a hockey game (more ice!) and settle into the corner of the couch with my legs elevated. I lay one ice pack under my left knee and another on top of it, making an ice pack sandwich. I then wrap an Ace bandage around both packs, pulling tight, and pressing the Velcro into the cloth to secure it. I repeat the process on the other knee and settle in to watch famous men shred a perfectly formed ice sheet while attempting to propel a galvanized hunk of rubber into goals of taut twine.

I begin the next day the way I do every day: trying to talk myself out of the morning ice bath. Why I still have the chicken-out conversations is a mystery. For more than three years, I’ve started every day with an exhilarating dunk. It makes me feel alive, quells many of the morning aches and pains that six decades have wrought, and elevates my mood better than a quad shot of espresso (although I still have that too). And yet, every morning, I attempt to talk myself out of it.

Well, you don’t really need to do it today. You dunked yesterday, and you’ll dunk again tomorrow, so you can skip today.

Every day it’s the same conversation, and every day it ends in a dunk. I’m always glad I did it and today is no exception. But today, the inner coward has another mission.

You don’t really have to go skate today. It can wait. Sure, you want to skate eventually, but maybe it doesn’t have to be today, because what if you fail? What if you can’t do it on these new knees? What if you fall and set back your recovery? How much would that suck? Yeah, it would definitely be the smart thing to put this thing off, mitigate the risk…

This is what I’m thinking as I drive to the rink.

I walk in the door to the Salt Lake City Sports Complex, bag hanging off my shoulder, stick in hand, as I’d done a thousand times (men’s league, drop-ins, stick & pucks, and fifteen years of coaching can sure add up). The locker room smell is unchanged: a sharp tang of industrial disinfectant layered over the faintly cheesy fug of hockey gear. A few hockey bags lay on the floor in front of the benches, and street clothes hang on hooks. One solitary extra stick leans in the stick rack. The locker room is quiet, the faint hum of the HVAC punctuated sporadically by the boom of a puck hitting hollow boards.

My feet are too fat for my skates, the foam inside my helmet has curled and dried in a way that feels like fingers squeezing my head like one of my uncles used to do, and I realize I’ve packed the set of hockey gloves that’s missing most of the leather on the palms. Two of the glove fingers flap as my actual fingers grip the stick.

All aspects of this thing that I’ve done for six decades feel completely foreign.

The door to the ice is heavy, and the oversized latch feels reassuringly solid and familiar in my hand as I yank it up, allowing a section of boards to swing open. I’ve always loved the feeling of stepping onto the ice, whether it’s an indoor rink or, better yet, a smooth frozen pond. The first few strides are so welcoming and the magic of the glide is as addictive as any opioid. But today, there’s a decided lack of buzz. On the first stride, I falter, and the second stride is just there to catch my falling body weight. So is the third.

Whose legs are propelling me forward toward a fall on my face?

I have to use my hockey stick to steady myself into a glide.

I take a few strides and wonder when I last sharpened my skates. They seem very uneven, and I feel like I’m stuck on my outside edges. And then I see my reflection in the plexiglass. I am standing stock straight, my posture conveying a level of anxiety that is downright embarrassing, but there it is for all to see.

I try to sink down into the next half a dozen strides, but when I do, the pressure in my knees increases until they feel oversized, as if the good doctor had mis-measured, ordered the wrong parts, and crammed them in anyway.

This is a mistake, says a quavering voice in my head that squeaks like a scared pre-teen. I wanna go home.

And then another voice answers: Suck it up, buttercup, it says.

This voice carries the baritone certainty of my peewee hockey coach, Moose Clark, and is not to be ignored. Do it right or it’s bag-skate time.

Although I’m reasonably certain that I am not under threat of the dreaded bag skate. If you know what it is, you will understand. If the term is unfamiliar, that’s okay. We can leave it there because the explanation is unseemly and may seem barbaric to the noninitiate. Just know that it’s not a good thing.

I push into my strides, sinking lower, and despite the oversized knee parts, I’m moving around the periphery of the rink fast enough to feel a breeze begin to dry the nervous sweat that’s rolling down my cheeks.

As I don’t want to test whether Travis Pastrana’s TP199 Reactive Memory Foam remains soft and pliable but hardens upon impact in the chilled rink environment, it’s time to assess any proximate threats. There are only five other people on the ice with me. One is a college hockey player from the University of Utah (the red helmet with the logo is a dead giveaway), one is a young hockey coach who is suiting up two tykes (which explains the thirty-something woman watching nervously from the stands), and the other is a giant of a teenager who looks like he learned to skate last week.

All present dangers.

The U of U kid is firing pucks at the net with considerable speed and an astonishing lack of accuracy. Crack, that one careens off the glass, three feet over the net. Boom, that one pounds the boards, two yards wide, and then Ping, that one rings off the crossbar. I’ll leave him to his own end of the ice. The coach with the tykes, who has put rings and cones on the ice, the better for the kids to slalom, is not much threat as long as one of the little nippers doesn’t take me out from behind. The wobbly giant, however, is a clear and present danger. He looks to be six foot four or five and can get up a considerable head of steam, but is gravely challenged by efforts to turn or stop.

I’ll be watching you, Jethro.

I do watch him and notice that he’s holding his phone in front of himself as he skates, more intent on taking selfies on skates than actually skating. In just a few more takes, his production is a wrap, and he’s wobbling off the ice toward the locker room.

Reasonably certain that I’m not going to get drilled by a puck or plowed into, I eye myself in the glass as I test the stability of a crossover, which, to my surprise, is starting to feel natural. Going counterclockwise anyway. Clockwise is more strained, but it always was that way. And speaking of how it used to feel, there’s something that was there before that is now gone: the sharp, bone-on-bone pain. Yeah, there’s some muscular discomfort—my quads are in spasm, and my calves and feet are starting to scream—but my knees don’t hurt. The odd, oversized feeling is different from the stabbing pain I’ve endured over the last few thousand strides of the previous ten years.

The realization is a revolution. Maybe the new knees will bring a new me.

Not ready to believe it, I slowly and cautiously test the pivot to backward skating, and I almost get to test the knee pads.

Now there’s a new inner voice.

Send it, senior, it says. Speed is your friend.

And I try the pivot again at a higher speed. Lubricated by momentum, it works without a hitch. Now I’m skating backwards, peering over my shoulder for giants and nippers and flying pucks. As my legs burn, a cool realization washes over me: I’m going to have to relearn a few things on these after-market knees, but I think I am going to be able to do this again. And without the kind of pain I’ve lived with for the last decade.

And on this day, that thought is all I need to feel warm inside as I drive home to reward my new knees with an ice pack sandwich, and maybe even float a few cubes in quiet celebration.