First Week Report

At this time last week, I was being wheeled into my room at St. Joe’s following my surgery. A lot has happened in this first week.

My knee swelling is less than half of what I experienced in those first few days. I am now on a very good “cocktail” of pain meds that keep my pain manageable—not gone, by any means—but in traumatic surgeries like these, we aim for manageable. I get around fairly well on my own via walker and a few awesome assist devices. This has caused a few problems since I keep jumping the shower line by going ahead of my scheduled day and time. They can’t catch me in time to stop me!

One of my goals for the new year was to learn to say focused in the moment, and this surgery has certainly given me lots of practice. There simply isn’t any energy to deal with what is happening in the world, at home, at work, or even in the next room. Every day is a focused experiment in making individual muscles work a little bit harder. It doesn’t feel good, but one is driven by necessity to do it anyway.

I have learned, in this one week, how much I have taken for granted as it concerns my legs. Never again will I take such precious gifts for granted. I have learned that when you are sick you do not want to hear about others’ problems, and you certainly don’t want to hear about how easy your process is from someone who hasn’t done it. I call these “third-party referrals.” It doesn’t matter how someone else did, each of us approach and experience the healing process in a very individual matter. We also don’t share the real truth of the ordeal with others because we believe that having working knees is still better than knees that don’t work, and the pain will be worth the effort.

Today in physical therapy I was working when one of the techs wheeled another knee replacement patient up to me. She had also had bilateral and wanted to know how mine was going. She was shocked to see what I could do. Her own surgery was 5 days before mine, and she still couldn’t get up and use the walker. Part of it was her age and weight, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not a one-size-fits-all process, which is why no surgeon wants to give you a hard timeline.

So, a the end of week one, I have 104 degrees of flexion and extension in my right knee, and 90 degrees in the left. I will try to keep these updates coming about every 2-3 days. More often if good stuff starts to happen.