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My lovely knee incision is mostly just a pretty clean red line with some flaky skin around it. I seem to have finished a hypersensitive period where everything annoyed my whole leg, but that lasted only a couple of days. But this weekend I started to wonder about a couple of spots that were different from the rest. There's a wide scabby patch right on the kneecap that just isn't healing as fast as the rest, and it keeps shedding drops of blood because one side keeps separating from the normal skin. So I sent a note to the PA asking whether this sounded like it was in the normal range, and he said to come show it to him, and I did, and it's normal, and for some reason both the PA and the surgeon who came in to confirm his onservations were in a great rollicking mood and joked around with me for a few minutes. I was a little apologetic-not apologetic about wasting their time with a non-problem, but they assured me they would rasther look at this kind of thing because incision care is the thing the whole surgery's success leans on. And then they said more silly things.
So that was a thing. So if tyou have a surgery and your incision looks weird to you, don't be afraid to drop a line to the doctor about it. I guess they'd rather look at a clean incision than not look at an infected one.
My friend Marilyn came over earlier and we wandered over to the community center to look at postal collages--that thing where a team of people serially work on each other's collages--I probably walked a mile totall maybe? A bit less? And yesterday my neighbor and I walked her granddaughter to the playground next to the soccer field, and that was probably about the same. Last Wednesday was the first time I tried that kind of distance, and it was fine, but afterwards my leg sulked for a day or two. You could call it overdoing, but maybe it was just-right-doing. I don't know. This week I guess it's not even overdoing. So tomorrow I'm going to walk to the Farmer's Market and buy some stuff. It will be well over a mile by the time I've walked around the Farmer's Market and come back. I figure I'll walk there, get a snack and sit at the chairs over there, and after a while I'll do the shopping part, then find a place to sit for a while, then walk back. I'm not a daredevil.
The whole point of doing these surgeries is so I can be a good walker again. I've never been athletic or even all that active, but I could walk all day, up and down hill, and I want that back. My stretch goal is to be able to walk down the Lost Camp trail. It's not that far (I forget--3 miles round trip?)but it is remarkably steep, and the time to go there is in chanterelle season, which is when the trail is wet and slick. So anyway what that means for me now is that I want to keep extending my walking range, but at a gentle enough rate that I don't burn out and have to start over. So I'm not actually doing all that I conceivably could. I'm trying to do just a bit more than I'm comfortable with.
Like stairs. I have demonstrated to myself that I can walk upstairs the normal way, in full steps,. taking full weight and flexion on my operated leg. But it's not actually helpful yet to do that-- my leg gets very pouty and refuses to perform at maximum in the rangfe of motion exercises afterwards. So what I'm doing instead is bringing my foot up to the next step as if I would step on it and then bringing it back to the step where my good leg is: making the knee go through the range of motion of stair climbing and not making it take the weight in that position. It takes twice as long to go up the stairs but I just got that much more range of motion exercise in.
So far the only things I plan to change when I have the other knee done are: insist on properly-fitting TED stockings--the company the hospital orders from does in fact make XL short, which will still be too long but not twelve inches too long like the regular ones: and I won;t feel like I have to be a good girl and follow the surgeon;'s directions on pain relievers. I'll use the alternating tylenol-tramadol at regular doses stratedgy from the beginning, and I'll know to taper off a wee bit earlier so I can sleep better. (still having some grand insomnia about half the nights and never sleeping a whole night, but it's not desperate seeming any more).
So that was a thing. So if tyou have a surgery and your incision looks weird to you, don't be afraid to drop a line to the doctor about it. I guess they'd rather look at a clean incision than not look at an infected one.
My friend Marilyn came over earlier and we wandered over to the community center to look at postal collages--that thing where a team of people serially work on each other's collages--I probably walked a mile totall maybe? A bit less? And yesterday my neighbor and I walked her granddaughter to the playground next to the soccer field, and that was probably about the same. Last Wednesday was the first time I tried that kind of distance, and it was fine, but afterwards my leg sulked for a day or two. You could call it overdoing, but maybe it was just-right-doing. I don't know. This week I guess it's not even overdoing. So tomorrow I'm going to walk to the Farmer's Market and buy some stuff. It will be well over a mile by the time I've walked around the Farmer's Market and come back. I figure I'll walk there, get a snack and sit at the chairs over there, and after a while I'll do the shopping part, then find a place to sit for a while, then walk back. I'm not a daredevil.
The whole point of doing these surgeries is so I can be a good walker again. I've never been athletic or even all that active, but I could walk all day, up and down hill, and I want that back. My stretch goal is to be able to walk down the Lost Camp trail. It's not that far (I forget--3 miles round trip?)but it is remarkably steep, and the time to go there is in chanterelle season, which is when the trail is wet and slick. So anyway what that means for me now is that I want to keep extending my walking range, but at a gentle enough rate that I don't burn out and have to start over. So I'm not actually doing all that I conceivably could. I'm trying to do just a bit more than I'm comfortable with.
Like stairs. I have demonstrated to myself that I can walk upstairs the normal way, in full steps,. taking full weight and flexion on my operated leg. But it's not actually helpful yet to do that-- my leg gets very pouty and refuses to perform at maximum in the rangfe of motion exercises afterwards. So what I'm doing instead is bringing my foot up to the next step as if I would step on it and then bringing it back to the step where my good leg is: making the knee go through the range of motion of stair climbing and not making it take the weight in that position. It takes twice as long to go up the stairs but I just got that much more range of motion exercise in.
So far the only things I plan to change when I have the other knee done are: insist on properly-fitting TED stockings--the company the hospital orders from does in fact make XL short, which will still be too long but not twelve inches too long like the regular ones: and I won;t feel like I have to be a good girl and follow the surgeon;'s directions on pain relievers. I'll use the alternating tylenol-tramadol at regular doses stratedgy from the beginning, and I'll know to taper off a wee bit earlier so I can sleep better. (still having some grand insomnia about half the nights and never sleeping a whole night, but it's not desperate seeming any more).
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