Day 2. Yesterday was a busy day of doing mostly nothing. I had a visit from the Home Health service about noon. At first during the day I was pretty pain free, but by the time Kathleen the PT/aid arrived I was feeling it. Burning sensation around where the incision is (covered right now of course), some pain when i moved around - I do a little practice walking with the walker and each time it was more painful. It reminds me of when I had a bike accident years ago & dumped on the concrete. The hip pain, tho, is gone.
The visit was supposed to be a short one but we wound up doing a number of things. Vitals check - I haven’t had blood pressure this low since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was using the cane wrong - using like hiking poles, with which very familiar - she taught me a different method that is better, the cane hinges at the opposite hip. I practiced that a bit (kind of too difficult yesterday) and this morning (much more able). I’m going to stick to the walker for now but I’m in a pretty confined location and not doing the stairs to the rest of the house - maybe tomorrow. We also looked at the before and after X-Rays (I can get these from Kaiser, but it takes some work, & they’re not shown in the patient dashboard). The before-after pictures look QUITE different - I have some questions now for the surgeon for later. I have an impressive looking screw in the acetabular insert to hold it in - i saw that item in the surgery report but it’s something to really see it. I need gait retraining, I had developed a ridiculous and probably dangerous walking style as the left hip deteriorated, and brain/muscle are still thinking they need to work that way. PT/aid said she’d work on that with me as my recovery progresses & it’s appropriate.
Best sleep in probably months - no more all - niter hip thrashing. Probably thanks to Percocet too.
I have what is for me a very complicated meds schedule to work out & planning on taking the Percocet on schedule for the next few days & then start tapering it off on Saturday if pain level remains low.
Kaiser at least here at their San Leandro center seems very well organised and efficient in this area. They have a program they call ERAS - early release after surgery. THey have intake, anaesthesia, & recovery very well organised and get you up and moving, and out, very quickly. The good side of this (aside from being at home) is that you are so pain-free from the meds at the end of Day 0 you can do anything - the next days, tho, look out. The team was very up front about warning us about this. You really need help Day 1 (we’ll see about Day 2, but I’m getting back to functional so far). There is some unavoidable repetition and redundancy in the process (I felt like making up random birthdates I was asked this so much) but they streamline what is typically a very tedious paperwork process. There was a patient across the hall from me in Recovery, a knee replacement, he was up a bit more than me & they had him cruising the hallway on his crutches - we both left at the same time. On the other hand, there was another patient across the hall who had to have general anaesthesia, another hip replacement patient, he was in a lot of pain on wake up & didn’t look like he was leaving - they don’t throw you out if you’re not ready.
I think getting a successful spinal block is one of the keys to getting early release. General is much harder on you. I remember curling up & getting a lite jab at the base of my spine, somebody slipping a mask over my mouth … and then finding myself flat face up with blurry faces over my head and someone saying “He’s coming around”. Perfect. I was in recovery. No memory of whatever it was they did.
I also learned they use the Hana table for anterior - I had forgotten to ask about that; maybe that’s standard for anterior surgery.
Ok, back to icing for a while.