Month: January 2018

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Total Hip Replacement 10: Four Weeks, Over and Out

heelsThis will be my last report on the hip replacement saga, winding it up with the nice round numbers of 10 posts and 4 weeks.  From here it appears there will be nothing interesting left to say about the recuperation [insert gesture to avoid evil eye here].

This past week, I took only one nap, finding that 30 minutes of relaxation usually does the trick when I get worn out.  I went on a shopping trip with a friend, walking and standing around for three hours, and came away with only tired feet.  I walked with my dog for an hour, up and down some good hills, ending with only wind-stiffened cheeks to complain about.  I’ve started doing gentle yoga stretches, with which my hip complies politely, and am starting to feel a little looser.  Last night, I clambered around on a steep, rocky hillside, in the dark, pushing a herd of horses from one paddock to another, with no problem.  I ate a lot of iron-rich Total cereal and dried apricots and black beans and whole grains, regaining a girlish blush in my cheeks.

The only change is with my scar.  I know it’s important to massage and manipulate a big wound to break up adhesions and unnecessary scar tissue.  And I know it’s painful.  I’m getting professional help with this soon, but once I passed the three-week, fully-knitted point, I watched a YouTube video on how to work on a scar and started doing it myself.  Ouch.  But it’s working — instead of a big, rectangular patch of hard, immovable flesh, I now have a pretty normal thigh with a rubbery scar down the middle.

In another month, my bone should be solid and I’m allowed to get back to most activities (riding!).  Another month after that, I have my final follow-up with the surgeon.  Somewhere in the 6-12 month range, I should be fully certified to do everything I will ever be able to do.  There are more markers to come, but the progress is already just incremental and I think it’s time to, quite literally, move on.

Final lesson learned: the anticipation is often (always?) worse than the reality.  But did the angst help by setting me up to be underwhelmed by the reality?  I’ll ponder this on my next long, pain-free walk.

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Total Hip Replacement 9: Three Weeks Out

Less and less to report each week, which is probably how it’s meant to be.

At the end of last week, I peeled off my surgical dressing to reveal my scar.  About 3 inches long, looking raw and gross.  By the end of this week, it looks tidy and pink and tolerable.  The only pain I really have left is that incision — the doctor says the nerves will take a while to settle down, so it bites and stings at times.

I don’t remember where my cane is.  I have relieved my husband of almost all horse duty.  I walked my dog like a normal person for the first time in many months.  I climbed all the stairs to my fifth-floor office.  No biggie.

The complaint this week was on-going fatigue.  Not normal fatigue, mind you, but a head-punching, blood-sapping, thought-killing swamp of exhaustion.  The couple of times I resisted the need to fall into a coma during the day, I was rewarded with searing headaches, a brain that refused to form a thought, and a long night caught like a fretful baby between an intense pull toward sleep and the inability to let go.

I tried to go back to work this week, with varied results.  I knew that showering, dressing, feeding the pets, straightening the house and driving 45 minutes down the winding canyon would use up some energy, but I was surprised to learn how much more it took to sit up and think and speak coherently about professional things.  I dragged through three half days, doing a little better when I stayed home on the couch and did my thinking from there.  Daily naps of one to two-and-a-half hours are de rigeur.

The doctor says it’s certainly anemia.  She said most patients are anemic after surgery, a fact glaringly absent from all the volumes of information I was given before the procedure.  If I had expected it, I wouldn’t have asked friends to bring me light, vegetarian food to recuperate on!  She said I may be feeling it especially because my hemoglobin count was quite high to start with — a virtue of being healthy at high altitudes, I guess — and sank precipitously immediately after the procedure.  My current levels are just above the need for a blood transfusion, and the steep differential probably hit me hard.  Plus, I wonder if living at almost 9,000 feet makes it harder to get by with those low levels than if I lived at sea level.  The worst news was it will take 3-4 MONTHS for those levels to climb back.  Hopefully I’ll continue to feel better during that time, because I need to work and also need to get out and use this new leg of mine.

I can definitely tell that this new hip works way better than the old one, rest its soul.  I’m pretty excited to put that to use.  After my next nap.