It has been a week since my knee surgery, and almost two weeks since my rotator cuff surgery. I guess I can say that I am doing as well as could be expected, given the circumstances.
Leah took me to a post-op followup Wednesday. They took out the stitches in my shoulder and took off the bandages and leg braces to get a look at my knee. This was the first time I had seen it. The incision is about six inches long, from my lower thigh, all the way across the knee. There are 28 staples holding it closed.
The staples are supposed to come out next Wednesday. The doctor is also going to set up some physical therapy for my knee at that time. In the meantime, he said I can use my half-walker and put some weight on the knee, as long as the brace is locked at full extension.
I have not had significant pain from my shoulder or my knee. I was taking hydrocodone for my shoulder, and was supposed to continue that for my knee. I was taking two pills at bedtime for a couple of days, but I stopped that Monday night. Not only am I not having enough pain to need the medication, there are also some fairly unpleasant side effects from an opioid like hydrocodone. I’ll be glad when that stuff is out of my system completely.
All told, I guess I can’t complain too much about my condition right now, especially since Leah is having to do all the work, plus deal with her own pain issues. Her laminectomy in December didn’t resolve her nerve pain issues, and the pain medication is not doing a very good job, either. That is very much a work in progress.
About six days ago from when this posts, I was getting close to the operating room, where a nice, young surgeon was planning to repair my torn rotator cuff. Now, a few hours from when this posts, I will once more be in the operating room, where the same young surgeon will repair my knee.
I had been adapting fairly well to having only one working arm, especially with two working legs. I had taken Zoe, our big, lumbering dog, out for a quick constitutional, and was starting up the three steps leading from our garage into our kitchen. And then something happened. I don’t really know how, but I was falling and twisting on the first or second step, completely unable to stop myself. I ended up wedged facing out between the steps and a bookcase we have against the garage wall. My right knee had a dent about the size of a pingpong ball and the shape of the edge of a stair tread. My shoulder was unharmed. I assume I somehow managed to twist around to protect it, but no one but the dog knows, and she isn’t talking.
I called out, and Leah rushed to see what had happened. I was not able to get myself out of the wedged position I was in. I couldn’t bring my good, left arm to bear, and my right arm was, of course, useless. I simply didn’t have the strength to get myself up. Leah brought a chair out, and I was able to scoot around to it and eventually climb up. I found that I could just stand on my right leg if I locked my knee, but otherwise I couldn’t support my weight with that leg.
To make a long story short, I tore the tendons that connect the quadriceps muscles to the knee cap. I can’t raise my leg because the muscles are no longer connected to their attachment point. I have been hobbling around with a cane and a leg brace to keep my knee from buckling.
We went to the surgeon’s office Wednesday, and he said we could repair it as early as Thursday. So I went for that. Better to get it over with. Leah was not happy, since that gave us essentially no time to prepare.
The doctor said I could stay in the hospital overnight or come home the day of the surgery. I chose to come home, but that might have been a mistake. I expect more pain with this surgery than with my shoulder repair. The shoulder repair was arthroscopic. The knee will not be.
The doctor wants me in a wheelchair for a couple of weeks, and then maybe a leg brace.
We got a wheelchair, but that’s probably the least of our worries. In addition to two dogs that will need walking, we also have to figure out how to get me from the hospital into our house. As it is now, I can back up to the rear door of our car and scoot myself across the seat, an inch at a time, until I can get my right leg into the car. Then, I have to reverse the process to get out. It turns out that leather seats and pants are not mutually slidey. And the little hump on the bench seat between the two outer seats is really big when you’re trying to slide over it with only one good leg. I don’t know how this will work when I get our of surgery.
The good part of this is that relatives have come out of the woodwork to offer to help. We have a cousin who lives in Texas Valley who volunteered to come over and help me out of the car and into the house. Another cousin and her husband, and my aunt have also volunteered to do anything they can. I posted on Facebook, looking for a dog walker, and the wife of our neighbor who graded our current lot volunteered to help any way she could. So that was encouraging. Anything will help at this point.
i’m going to skip capitalization and might leave more misspellings than usual in this post. i will explain .
friday was the day of my rotator cuff surgery. i walked the dogs just before dawn, and we were waiting at outpatient registration by 8 am. after they took me back for prep, they injected about a dozen different medications. prednisone for nausea. a couple of pain meds. antibiotics. some other stuff.
they gave me this stylish cap because i was getting the special on hair highlighting, or so leah told me. i recently got a haircut [yay second vaccination!], so there wasn’t much hair to work on.
despite my expression, this was before all the injections.
after they injected the sedative and stuck a mask for oxygen and anesthesia, and i was out, they stuck a syringe into my neck and gave me a block that paralyzed and numbed my right side from the rightmost part of my diaphragm to the tips of my fingers.
shortly after that, by my own perception, i woke up dazed and confused. i couldn’t understand why they had me carrying around a bag filled with someone else’s arm, but it turned out that they had placed my right arm in a sling.
after freely emptying my bladder, a requirement for release, and a few other adjustments, leah drove me home. there i was able to explore the effects of the block.
my arm felt cold and dead, until i touched my hand and realized it was still alive, at least in some cruel parody of life. at this point as i write this, about 12 hours after the block, i can make weak grASPING [dang. hit the caps lock] motions with my fingers, but have absolutely no ability to extend my fingers in the opposite direction. see below.
you might hear zoe whining in the background. she likes peanut butter and was afraid i wouldn’t be able to open the jar. leah came to the rescue.
as to my rotator cuff, i have no doubt that if and when my power of movement returns, and my shoulder heals, i will have a fully functioning shoulder. the same surgeon who did my left shoulder did this one, and my left rotator cuff has been operating at or near 100 percent for more than a decade. he’s a good surgeon, and the ladies agree that he is “cute” as well. the ladies keep asking whether i agree. he’s certainly passable in a surgical mask and cap.
he told my wife that operating on my shoulder was much easier than some he works on [probably including the strapping young man who waited in line after us] because i have no fAT [what, again?] on my shoulder. so, collecting all my body fat around my waist finally paid off.
aside from an arm that feels literally dead, or in its death throes, my only after effects have been slight nausea, lack of appetite and a terrible taste in my mouth, that, i assume, comes from all the chemicals my body is trying to eliminate. the block will wear off in a matter of hours, maybe by the time anyone happens to read this post, and i expect to have some level of pain. i have been supplied with drugs for that eventuality
in the meantime, i expect to have my first night’s sleep in weeks that isn’t interrupted by shoulder aches and pains.
One of the things I like least about cats is that they are little killers. Mollie regularly brings lizards into the house, either previously killed or saved for later killing. Chloe brought a young squirrel onto the front porch, which after allowing it to age a little, she began to eat from the head down. Sylvester has brought several killed animals into the garage. This is what he brought us Tuesday.
It’s a black and white warbler. They are ground nesters, which probably explains how Sylvester found and killed it.
I know that cats are hunters and killers by nature; it’s what they do. I still don’t like it. The cats are lucky Leah is here.
I am not a birder, so I had to look this bird up. Cornell University has some nice resources for bird information. I found some audio files for the pileated woodpeckers we have around here. Now they have an app for identifying birds from photographs. I had already figured out that the bird was a black and white warbler, but I downloaded the app and the bird database for the Southeast to recheck.
On a more pleasant note, I saw some tiny flowers on my morning dog walk.
It looks kind of like the Milky Way.
These are bluets. I see them fairly often around the mountain, but this was a large enough patch that it caught my eye from a distance. They can be propagated from seed or by transplanting. I think I’ll try to bring some into our yard somewhere.
And, on the pain and suffering front, I had pre-op visits to my orthopedic surgeon and the hospital on Tuesday. I am scheduled for rotator cuff repair Friday morning. I have mentioned this to a few people, and everyone who has had rotator cuff repair has warned me that it’s the worst, very painful. I had my left rotator cuff repaired about 11 or 12 years ago. As I recall, it was not particularly painful. I needed pain medication for a couple of nights immediately after surgery, but after that, even the physical therapy was not bad. I hope to repeat that experience with my right shoulder.
Unfortunately for me, I am right handed, so hanging my right arm from a sling for weeks is going to be an inconvenience. Leah and I have not figured out yet how the dogs are going to get their walks. Zoe is a real plow horse on our walks, and Sam likes to tie me up with his leash by walking circles around me. Neither of those is a good fit for someone with a healing shoulder injury.
I’m sure everything will work out just fine. One way or another.
Spring weather may be variable in Georgia, but one thing is going to be pretty consistent — pollen.
I walked around in the front yard on Tuesday. Later in the evening, when I was sitting with my feet on a pillow on our coffee table, I noticed some yellow smudges on the pillow. It was pollen off my socks. This is what my shoes looked like. I brushed the pollen off my left shoe for comparison.
The pollen count here was 3336 particles per cubic meter, high, but nowhere near as high as the record. Atlanta’s highest recorded pollen count was 9369 particles on March 12, 2021.
They say that tree pollen is the highest contributor now. That’s mainly pine and oak. Around here, it’s mainly pine that produces the billowing clouds of fine, yellow particles that coat everything. I have to rinse my truck windshield with a hose every time I go anywhere. We park our car in the garage, so it stays relatively clean, but an hour outside leaves a fine layer of yellow particles over the entire car.
It’s really quite annoying. A locally well-known gardening expert recommends avoiding painting outside from mid-March to early April. It’s early April right now, and I wouldn’t paint anything outside that I didn’t want yellow.
Most of the pine pollen should be gone by May. I hope.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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