One week out now! Actually just a couple hours short of a week. I was wheeled into the OR at exactly 1 PM last Tuesday. It’s currently 9:40 AM, s this time a week ago I was taking my last steps on the bad knee and having a bunch of stuff stuck into me to prep me for surgery. Time sure goes by fast!
Things are still going well. Last night I chose to skip my oxy dose before bed and just max out the Tylenol. I had the oxy waiting at my bedside for me just in case I woke up in the middle of the night needing it. I did wake up around 2 AM but I felt fine, so didn’t take anything. I woke up again around 4 AM and was hurting a little, but not severely, so I just took another dose of Tylenol. I haven’t taken any oxy since. Everything seems to be fine. The pain I have is a little bit of constant dull ache, nothing stabbing or severe, and I can use my current best friend (the ice machine) to deal with that. It’s very good news to me that I could get off the narcotics after a week.
I got halfway decent sleep last night for the first time since surgery. My fitness tracker shows that I got 4 hours and 34 minutes of sleep last night, with a sleep score of 51 which is poor. But this was the first measurable sleep it logged since last Monday, so it’s progress. I’m told I can skip the elevation and even sleep on my side now, which helps a lot, except finding a comfortable position is still tough. Sleeping on my side means putting a little pressure on a very swollen thigh, which isn’t pleasant. A few more days of healing should help that problem.
The only thing is this morning I’m breaking into cold sweats at random times. I’ll just be sitting in my chair strapped into my ice machine and all of a sudden I have sweat dripping off my forehead and my T-shirt is all wet. It will last for a minute or two and then go away. It has happened to me 3 or 4 times this morning. I’m wondering if maybe it’s some mild withdrawal symptoms from cutting off the narcotics. I’ve read various things about that, with most of them saying you shouldn’t experience any major withdrawals if you’ve only taken oxy for a short time, like less than two weeks, but I guess anything is possible. Or maybe this is just part of the healing process and my body rebelling? I almost didn’t get sent home from the hospital last week because my blood pressure kept dropping at random times.
Outside of that, PT is going very well. The home PT I have for the rest of this week is encouraging but not pushing. I like that. She has observed that the big goal now is correcting my gait. My muscles have been trained to limp on that side, so they’re still tending to do that even though they don’t need to do that anymore. So a lot of work ahead on correcting posture and gait so that hopefully the other joints that were hurting me prior to surgery go back to behaving.
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