My First Follow-up with the OS

Real quick. You might’ve noticed the new profile picture. I haven’t shaved since the surgery, almost 2 weeks ago. This is my “Rocky training in Siberia for the Drago fight” look. It makes me feel tougher. And like a hobo, all at the same time. Amazing, huh? We’ll see how long the beard lasts.

12 days after the surgery, I met with Turgeon for my first follow-up. He says the knee looks good. No swelling. No bruising. I’m a fast healer, I guess. I asked if the implanted cartilage cells were working. He shrugged. At this point, he said, there’s no way to tell. He joked about simply letting the black box inside my knee work its magic. I liked that expression, and added it to my profile description. Turgeon plucked out about 25 staples from my knee. In rapid fire motion, he started with the staples near my shin and worked his way up to the ones on my thigh. It didn’t really hurt. A few times, the staple didn’t come out smoothly and some of the skin surrounding the staple got ripped out, like somebody who gets a bit overaggressive removing stapled pages of paper and winds up tearing off the top corner. Next, Turgeon lathered iodine up-and-down the incision to sterilize the wound, making my leg felt like a baby back rib. He then placed a number of steri-strips across the leg. The knee looks nasty. Let’s hope the expression, “chicks dig scars,” is true.

I attached 2 photos of my knee after the staples were removed. In the first photo, sans steri-strips, the scar looks off-center. I think that's just the camera angle. At least that's what I'm hoping.

I meet again with Turgeon in 2 weeks. In the meantime, he wants me to start putting 25% weight on my bum wheel, slowly working my way up to 50%. This concept is referred to as Partial Weight Bearing (PWB, another acronym for you to remember). Either at that appointment or the next one, I think Turgeon will allow me to “open up” the brace a bit from its current 0 degree locked position, allowing me to bend the knee slightly. In perfect metaphorical fashion, opening up the brace will immediately open the door to an improved quality of life. Honestly, it really sucks spending the entire day with a peg leg entrapped in a massive black brace. It’s impossible to get comfortable in any position – laying down, sitting up, with my leg propped up on some pillows. You name it.

Sleep is difficult, at best. If I’m lucky, I manage a 3-4 hour block of sleep. Most times, I wake up every 2 hours, sometimes with my knee in discomfort, sometimes because I simply can’t find an acceptable sleeping position. I’m not used to sleeping flat on my back. Last night, for example, I couldn’t fall asleep despite getting some long overdue nookie. Like most guys, stick a fork in me after nookie; I’m done. Content. Relaxed. Ready to enjoy a solid 8-hours’ worth of sleep. But not last night. My hamstring throbbed uncontrollably, likely the result of some strenuous stretching by my PT that morning. She told me my hamstring got tighter over the weekend. Not sure how that happened, but it’s not a good sign. Anyway, after failing to loosen up my hamstring (note: never a fun thing to try at 11:30pm with a sleep-deprived wife), I alternated between whining and crutching around the bedroom. Neither worked. Finally, at 3am I decided to hop into the CPM machine. I hoped the CPM would alleviate the hamstring discomfort, and perhaps rock me to sleep. Well, the CPM went 1-for-2. My hamstring stopped throbbing, but I could never fall asleep, no matter how many times my leg rhythmically rose up-and-down. After an hour in the machine, I woke up Christina to turn it off. I also asked her to grab me a vicodin. Poor Christina. She’s suffering as bad as me. Thank god our pre-nup is iron-clad or she would’ve walked out days ago. I jostled around for another thirty minutes before finally finding a comfortable position. I slept for 90 minutes until the alarm woke me up. Luckily, I don’t have to be anywhere, so I fell back to sleep for another 90 minutes, finally grabbing my morning coffee at 8am.