Four Weeks Later

It's been exactly four weeks since surgery. I don't try, but I'm always connecting days and dates to events, so I've been anticipating this artificial milestone. I say "artificial" because it's just a day on the calendar - nothing hugely significant has happened to distinguish today from yesterday.

As I've been anticipating reaching today, I've been trying to think how to sum up my status. Generally, over the past few days, I've felt as if I've been at a plateau, a point where I've leveled off in my post-operative, post new-joint recovery. I'm still pretty slow and unsteady without crutches and my operative leg still hurts more than I thought it would. (More on the pain in a moment). So where's the progress?

I wondered that this morning as I pulled into the parking lot at work and my cell phone slid onto the floor. I remembered visiting the office just two weeks ago today and then writing in this blog how disastrous it would have been if I'd done something as simple as dropping my car keys. Well, picking up my cell phone this morning was no big deal, coming in to the office is starting to feel routine, limping and gimping in no big deal. So... yeah, I've made some significant progress in the past two weeks - very significant. Even if it doesn't feel as if I'm setting the world on fire progressing from one day to the next, simply changing the magnification level at which I'm examining the situation gives me some good perspective. I'm moving forward - it's just slow. I did opt to leave the crutches in my car when I got to work this morning. About halfway across the parking lot. I started to wonder if maybe that wasn't such a good idea. It wasn't. I'll get the crutches again at lunchtime. Maybe tomorrow will be a "good" day to stop using them. Maybe not...

About the pain: As I mentioned above, I'm surprised at how much this still hurts - and, despite hearing and reading heroic stories about people who've never taken a single pain-killer since their surgery, I'm only too happy to dial back the discomfort by taking a pill a few times a day. As my primary care doctor once told me, "God put poppies on the planet for a reason." So, how bad is the pain, now four weeks out? Doctors always ask you to rate pain on a one-to-ten scale, which is pretty inadequate. We've all heard how Eskimos have some huge number of words to describe snow; well, I have a few dozen words to describe pain - there are just so many kinds of it. Simply ascribing a number doesn't do the job.

Today's pain isn't run-for-the-hills-screaming-and-crying pain. It's dull but intense. It's a combination of two or three different sensations. The simplest to describe is the kind of pain you felt when you were a kid and someone pulled the chair out from under you and you landed hard on the floor. Another concomitant sensation is that eye-watering, jarring hurt you feel when you jump off a rock or fence or something that's really about as high as you can jump without breaking something when you land. And the other major sensation is right at the incision site - the bruising kind of hurt that happens when you run into something - hard - and it swells up in about a nanosecond. Honestly, if I didn't have pain medicine, I don't think this current concoction of discomfort would send me over the edge, but it certainly would keep me home in bed, pretty grouchy. I'm not taking enough meds to make the pain go away - and I don't really get a narcotic "buzz" - but the medication helps me get through.

The pain at this point surprises me because I didn't know what to expect heading into this process. It doesn't shock me, doesn't make me think something's wrong, and doesn't make me think I made a mistake having the surgery. From everything I've read and heard, it's a normal part of the process. When it goes away - hopefully in the next couple of weeks - now that will be a milestone!