Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Two Weeks Out and Counting...

As I walked around the house for the 500th time, slowly and deliberately, putting no more than 75% of my weight on the new hip joint while relegating the other 25% to the walker and my arms, it occurred to me that the surgery involved actual skeletal dismemberment. I’m happy I didn’t think of it that way beforehand! If you’ve been dismembered, are you then re-membered when they put you back together? I suppose not. Deconstructed and reconstructed would probably be better descriptors.

So how am I doing? I think I’m doing rather well. Two weeks ago at this time I was lying in a hospital bed, attempting to get some sleep, which my roommate managed to keep me from achieving. PT finally came to get me up out of bed for the first time on Thursday afternoon. I was hurting, mostly from the incision, but I had nowhere near the level of pain I had before going under the knife. When the surgeon came in Friday morning and asked if I was ready to go home, I thought he had lost his mind. I stayed the extra day, and I’m glad that I did.
 
The home health PT keeps asking about my pain levels, and when I tell her 1 or 2, she looks at me like I’m crazy. I have a rather high threshold for pain; maybe for someone else this would be a 5 or 6. I’m anxious to get to my follow up visit in two more weeks. Perhaps I will be allowed to move from the walker to a cane. Of course, I may miss my walker and its little basket in which I am transporting things like bottles of water, books, and other printed materials I’m working on over the course of the day.
 
I’m also looking forward to the time (hopefully soon) when I can sit and type for more than an hour without the operative leg swelling up. It is considerably less than it was at first, but I’m still not quite there.
 
We’ll have a post-surgical redux after the post-op visit!

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