@Jaycey
I had accrued a ton of sick leave over the years, but I used 6 weeks at the beginning of the school year with my first BTKR. I have 5 paid weeks left. Then I’ll move to the unpaid 12 weeks FMLA leave. So I have 17 weeks with a combination of paid and unpaid. We can make it on my husband’s salary if we need to. Thank goodness we just paid our very last university tuition bill! The summer months won’t count against my sick/FMLA leave. There are 13.5 weeks left in the school year. I just hope I’m all better by the beginning of next school year, or my job will be at risk.
@Cococay
Yes, this came out of nowhere. I had my BTKR on July 6th and was released from my surgeon on Nov 10th. At that point everything looked good. The right leg wasn’t getting its range of motion back as quickly as the left (especially extension), but it has lagged behind since day one and was plagued by tight hamstring issues. I kept reading no two knees heal the same, and it takes a full year to recover, so neither my surgeon nor I thought twice about it. Then I overdid it Thanksgiving weekend (didn’t everyone!). I got some swelling. And at some point that weekend I hit the coffee table leg with my left shoe and stumbled. That really made my right knee sore. I got a sore bump below my knee on the front medial side. It was super tender to touch and a red roundish mark appeared. I thought it was just a soft tissue injury because surely a little stumble wouldn’t ruin the implant. By mid December, the bump had gone down, tenderness had abated, and the red mark had faded and peeled. Good - I thought that confirmed that it was all soft tissue related. But the tenderness, lower leg swelling and red mark came back in mid January. I’d had a really busy day running all over my 3 floor school, so I figured the swelling was because of that. I had my school nurse look at it. She said then that I should probably get it checked. But again, a couple of days later, swelling went down some, red mark faded and peeled, tenderness subsided. However, I did then make an appointment for March 2nd with my GP. I needed a physical anyway and would talk to her about it. It seemed so minor, I didn’t want to look like Chicken Little - “The sky is falling! The sky is falling.” But then it happened a 3rd time last week. I had a hard time walking for the first half of the day due to the discomfort, and my lower leg was visibly swollen. Red mark was there but very light. The school nurse saw me hobbling, saw the swelling and insisted I go to my surgeon to get checked. She thought it was a blood clot/DVT. So I called, and they squeezed me in for the next day. My appointment was with my surgeon’s PA. He hemmed and hawed over my leg because it doesn’t look that bad (just a little swollen). But he did agree that it was odd. He also noticed that the extension was worse than it was on Nov 10th. It was hard for me to tell. I just thought my left was progressing so much faster and the right had stalled that the gap in ROM between the two was getting bigger/more noticeable. But ROM in the right had actually decreased. So he consulted with my surgeon. They decided to start with xrays and bloodwork. Unfortunately they knew immediately when they saw the xrays. The infection has already entered both my femur and tibia. They could see the changes to the bones on the X-ray. They grilled me on dental work, open wounds, etc. trying to figure out what sparked the infection. (Only 2 little things I could think of after the appointment - an ingrown hair in my pubic area and a tiny scab on the inside edge of my nose that keeps getting irritated - both totally normal things that I didn’t think anything of at the time, but one of them may have been the cause.) At this point in my appointment, the surgeon took over, and things went into hyperdrive. Explant surgery was scheduled, blood work and CT scan orders/scheduled. I held it together until I got in my car, and then I bawled.
United States
