Catching up to now

Writing about the hospital was pretty exhausting, so I took a few days off from the blog. I want to catch up to now so I can write when things happen instead of trying to remember what happened a week ago. Luckily, the events at home are far less extensive.

I came home on Saturday, about 70 hours after the end of surgery. Dr. Trice gave me a goal of getting to 90 degrees on the CPM by my first follow-up appointment on the next Thursday (April 1st). Physical therapy is my full-time job right now. I spend 6-8 hours on the CPM, but have to break that up into sessions of less than 2.5 hours max with significant breaks in between. Additionally, I have to manually wiggle my patella around (sounds dirty, right?), do quad sets (flexing and relaxing my thigh muscle), and sit in a chair and use my left leg to support my surgery leg through bending and straightening. Each of those exercises means I need to take off the ice and I can only go without ice for about 5-10 minutes. Bottom line, I am always doing some sort of PT or recovering from some sort of PT.

I reached my 90 degree goal and went to my first post-op on Thursday. A nurse removed the staples and I counted as she did. 41! That's a respectable number, right? She replaced them with little cloth strips (GR 3) that still hold the incision together. It's an exquisite incision and will leave a beauty of a scar. I will finally have something to show for all this knee trouble! The previous surgeries only left unsatisfying little dots.

The character of the pain has changed since the first few days home. At first, I ached all the time and pain management meant keeping the aching down. Now, I am actually pretty comfortable as long as I am not moving. That would be great and I could easily cut down the meds drastically if that was all that mattered. However, remember all that PT? I have to move in those exercises and change position between them. The muscles supporting my knee are weak, so it feels like it gets tweaked when I move it around. So, that is now the type of pain I am managing. I keep trying to cut back on pain meds, and then I winced and gasped every time I moved until my husband said, "Sometimes I love your stubborn streak, but this is not one of those times. So will you please take your pain meds now?" He's my reality check. :)