Do me a favor...

I want everyone to look down at their left knee and repeat these words, "Thank you for bending."

Now I'm far from crippled and will definitely recover from all this, so I don't want to come across as a guy who thinks his life is ending. I think more than anything we all kind of take our bodies for granted. They do some pretty spectacular stuff. You realize how awesome something like your left knee bending is whenever it can't do it.

I went into the surgery thinking, "I've been on crutches before, it won't be all that bad." Let me give you an example of a couple things that bending your knee, even just a few degrees, makes easier. This will be significantly more fun for you if you like: 1) people doing things that look awkward, or 2) people falling down. Imagine me, you, your best friend, or pretty much anyone that you enjoy falling down or looking awkward and you might even laugh out loud.

Go get into your car with your left leg totally straight. Just try it. Oh, and don't take the easy way out and get into the driver's side or back seat, get right into the passenger's side. Now, while you struggle to push the seat all the way back and plop your behind onto the chair, do a crab-walk style push up with your arms to slowly rotate your foot into the floorboard. Make sure you bang your foot against something two or three times too. You will probably have to raise yourself onto your console and spin around on it. Thank goodness I'm short because that makes it a bit easier.

The one thing that I never thought would be hard is going to the bathroom. Go sit on your toilet with one leg straight. Sitting down isn't too tough, but getting everything positioned to where you are getting all your business where it needs to go is a challenge, and is actually really funny. My major complaint here is that, quite frankly, sitting in my bathroom and reading is a very important and relaxing part of my day. Now I just kind of spin around on the toilet seat trying to make sure that I don't leave myself a mess to clean up. Ok, that was kind of graphic, but I laugh about it every time I think about it.

I could go on and on about all the funny ways I have almost fallen down, or knocked various things over with my foot. Finding the comedy in this stuff is the best way to deal with it. I mean, it took me 25 minutes to eat a bowl of cereal today. I had to crutch into the kitchen and grab the closed box of cereal so if I dropped it wouldn't spill. Then I repeated that with the milk, Then I went back and grabbed the bowl and spoon (held in my mouth). Then I poured my cereal and ate my delicious Honey Bunches of Oats. Upon finishing my cereal I realized there was another 5 minute ordeal to put the stuff up. But hey, taking forever to get stuff done makes the day go by faster at least.

I have a spectacular group of friends that have made everything as easy as possible during this. Bringing me video games, doing my laundry, bringing me cake, just listening to me babble while I'm on pain meds, you name it and these people have done it. I also know that there are a ton of people who have kept me in their thoughts and prayers and I appreciate that a lot. This hasn't quite been the easy operation I expected. It's very common but I guess it is a pretty major surgery and I wasn't really prepared for it. It's a good thing all the people in my life were. Thanks again.

I started therapy yesterday and that should be just a barrel of fun... I'll blog more about that some other time. I will have time to as well, considering I go 3 times a week for the next 16 weeks. I didn't realize how long that was until the scheduler lady asked me when I could come in the day after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, I just wanted to give everyone an update on how things were going. Just make sure you think about how awesome it is when everything is working properly. Jamie and I had a pretty good conversation about how impressive the human body actually is, which led to talking about creation and God, and all kinds of good stuff. That seriously was a great hour we spent talking. I just want to thank all of you and God for helping me through this. I'll be back in a couple of days!

Minard out. (Yeah, I just used Ryan Seacrest's sign off)