- Joined
- Aug 9, 2013
- Messages
- 6,157
- Age
- 67
- Location
- Northern California
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Female
I understand how it can be discouraging when you compare yourself to others. My advice to you is not to compare your knee and recovery to anyone else's knee. I know you want a quick recovery so you can get back to your life, but at 16 days out you're just barely getting started and still have a long road ahead. It will be filled with good days and not-so-good days. But somewhere around three months you will feel significantly better; not 100% recovered by any means, but much better.
I know it's almost a cliche, but everyone's knees and bodies recover differently. There are similarities, but no knee will recover exactly the same as another knee; even two knees on one body will recover differently. Heck, I've had a TKR and a revision on the same knee and those recoveries were like night and day! One recovery was miserable, slow and painful, the other was almost without pain, pretty easy and totally boring. Same body, same knee and two totally different recoveries.
As for the difference in your ROM, hospital measured ROM is basically useless as in most cases the swelling hasn't set in yet so almost everyone's ROM will decrease after a few days or so. Plus, one day you'll have decent ROM, the next day it will have decreased again. This has to do with the amount of swelling present on any given day, external swelling you can see and internal swelling you cannot see. On day 17 after my revision I had almost no visible swelling, yet could not bend my knee far; that was because I had plenty of internal swelling that wasn't visible and it was keeping me from bending. Later on down the road my knee was again visibly swollen, so you never know where you'll be at any point and just need to allow your knee to recover at it's own pace.
Don't stress over ROM; it will come with time. That's why I've not allowed anyone to measure my ROM this last time; I knew it would be different every time someone measured it so numbers were meaningless to me. What I measured was my ability to do things on a daily basis. I could see small progress in my ability to walk and move around, lift my leg on my own, bend a little more over time, and so on. Where you are today, very early in your average year-long recovery, is not where you'll be next week, next month, two months from now and so on. It takes a lot of patience to travel this path; I encourage you to dig deep and find that well so you can draw from it daily.
I know it's almost a cliche, but everyone's knees and bodies recover differently. There are similarities, but no knee will recover exactly the same as another knee; even two knees on one body will recover differently. Heck, I've had a TKR and a revision on the same knee and those recoveries were like night and day! One recovery was miserable, slow and painful, the other was almost without pain, pretty easy and totally boring. Same body, same knee and two totally different recoveries.
As for the difference in your ROM, hospital measured ROM is basically useless as in most cases the swelling hasn't set in yet so almost everyone's ROM will decrease after a few days or so. Plus, one day you'll have decent ROM, the next day it will have decreased again. This has to do with the amount of swelling present on any given day, external swelling you can see and internal swelling you cannot see. On day 17 after my revision I had almost no visible swelling, yet could not bend my knee far; that was because I had plenty of internal swelling that wasn't visible and it was keeping me from bending. Later on down the road my knee was again visibly swollen, so you never know where you'll be at any point and just need to allow your knee to recover at it's own pace.
Don't stress over ROM; it will come with time. That's why I've not allowed anyone to measure my ROM this last time; I knew it would be different every time someone measured it so numbers were meaningless to me. What I measured was my ability to do things on a daily basis. I could see small progress in my ability to walk and move around, lift my leg on my own, bend a little more over time, and so on. Where you are today, very early in your average year-long recovery, is not where you'll be next week, next month, two months from now and so on. It takes a lot of patience to travel this path; I encourage you to dig deep and find that well so you can draw from it daily.