Post-Op Day 28: Why did I go to the Zoo?

The San Diego Zoo is world famous, now it's famous for destroying my knee. I thought I needed some "real" exercise and we decided to hit the zoo yesterday. I brought along my brace just in case I would need it. We left in the early afternoon, no reason to kill ourselves. The real reason was that we all woke up at 6 am to get ready for a family picture (with Andrew's stitches face) at 7:30am. We all were dressed and showed and we took the pictures. We had about 10 minutes to take pictures because Rachel could only stay that long. She was taking pictures as a service project for the young women all Saturday. After the quick pics, I came home in a bad, bad mood and went back to bed immediately without passing go. I ended up crashing for 4 hours and woke up a little after noon. Ouch. We all got ready and piled into the car and on the way down to the zoo, we stopped off at Kinkos so Michele could make some copies of the new and improved Relief Society directory. She ran in and order 90 copies. When we jumped back into the car and we were on our way to the zoo, she noticed that the back pages of the copies were uneven, light and dark, on her sample. She called a canceled the order and she decided to make the copies at another place were the copier actually worked. We were losing time so I sped to the zoo.

The zoo was packed. It was about 68-70 degrees and just perfect for zoo time. I couldn't believe how many people were there. It was crazy. Andrew was asleep in the car and wouldn't wake up. Michele and I ended up carrying him, on my bad knee, for the first hour. It was terrible. When Andrew finally warmed up and started to walk by himself, it was Panda time. We waited in line to see the new Panda and it was great because the mom was eating bamboo. She was ripping the bamboo up with her teeth. FYI: Bamboo is so strong that it would destroy a wood chipper. Pandas have incredibly strong jaws and teeth and they can chew it up. At least I thought it was cool info.

We walked all the way up to the new Polar bear exhibit that was redone. A little disappointing. It was basically an advertisement for global warming and making us feel bad for driving our car down to the zoo to see these awesome animals. I was a little put off. Politics shouldn't be at the zoo. To make matters worse, the bears were sleeping way off to the side. By the time I got to the bears, my knee was killing me. So we decided to take a little break with ice cream and cookies to make the pain go away. It didn't. We hiked back around and saw the big elephant exhibit and then walked to the car. By the time I got back to the car my knee was on fire. I can't believe I thought it'd help to walk around for 5 hours on a knee that just had ACL surgery. It hurt ALL night; even doped up on the pain pills. It was really rough. So I'm deciding to take a different approach to rehab. I'm going to do less endurance walking and more relaxing and stretching. I think ice cream, back rubs, foot massages, and chocolate chip cookies would do wonders for my knee. I go in to see Dr. Kim next Monday and we'll see what needs to be done after that as far as physical therapy goes.