POST-SURGERY -DAY 3

It is always a surprise to me when a nurse or doctor phones days after surgery to see if I am okay. When a nurse whom I had met at the time of surgery called two days after surgery to see how i was doing, I was pleasantly surprised. The gesture was consistent with all the care I had received in the less than 3 hours I had been in the surgical unit on the day before Christmas. She assumed I didn't remember the instructions given to me just before discharge, less than an hour after the operation. Of course she was right. I had totally forgotten I was given a sheet of them though I seemed to have remembered most of what I had been told.

Having spent an extremely painful previous night, I was relieved by the pain medication that had been prescribed with a firm admonition before I had left that I should not let the pain build up, but to take the medication every four hours. I was to wake myself up and not go through the night, so I just stayed up and read until 5 AM which was easier for me.

I was told to take the bandage off and that the fluid with which they had filled the knee would take a bit to absorb and empty, making it easier and less painful to bend my knee. I was not prepared for the river of fluid mixed with blood that ran down my leg from my knee when the bandage came off. I had to leap to get it off the rug and rushed to the kitchen with its ceramic tiled floor which was far easier to mop up than from the rugs everywhere else.

Miraculously, as the nurse had told me, once the fluid was out I was able to bend my knee 90 degrees and the pain had diminished. If I didn't live in Grand Central Station I might have also been able to take a shower. The odoriferous zephyr around me certainly suggested it was time to do just that. Nevertheless, it got too late for me to shampoo my hair and have time to dry it before bedtime so I waited until the next day. Happily, I had no problem shedding the crutches and maintaining my balance. In a flash, the oft stated, "Boy, a shower never felt any better!" spoke itself in the echoes of the room.

Now that all the anesthesia has surely warn off after three days, I can tell that it was worth having to work to convince a surgeon that I knew what I was talking about and that it had not been a diagnosis that could have been made from x-ray only. The MRI took it the necessary step further and I now was much relieved, though agreeing that the next step after physiotherapy was probably going to be a knee replacement. The vision in my head is that part-by-replacement-part would eventually either make me pretty bionic or beyond salvage.

My suspicion is that nothing will stop my knee from making it hard to get out of a chair if I have sat still more than 15 minutes. Ice packs on it are still helpful but being able to wobble around with out crutches is sheer Heavenly delight.