Post -Op Day 4

Surgery was on Thursday, January 22, 2009. I have been too hopped up on painkillers and too sleepy to make a very worthy blog entry since arriving home from the hospital on Thursday evening. Now that I'm slowly kicking the painkillers, I noticed that I have some time to kill to put it mildly.

The days leading up to surgery were stressful and way busier than I had hoped but I really don't know who I was kidding thinking otherwise. We had a house to re-arrange, groceries to buy, clothes to wash, cars to clean, etc. on top of trying to get ready to be out of the office for 3 weeks. It reminded me of the days before the bar exam in 2003 -- I had hoped to be all zen and calm and relaxed but instead I was up till the wee hours the night before getting things ready and racing around the house making my hip sore (I got 2 hours of sleep the night before the CO bar exam and still passed...I got a little more than that for this surgery but I'm not sure it made much of a difference in terms of results). The morning of surgery the girl from the ortho equipment company came to show me how to use the ice and CPM machines...the dogs were barking and chasing eachother around the house, Brian was upstairs vaccuming and I was still dripping from the shower...it was the usual pandemonium. Not suprisingly, I didn't really remember what I was supposed to do with the machines when I got home 12 hours later in a narcotic haze.

Surgery was scheduled for 12pm but they were running behind so it was really a little before 1 when they finally wheeled me into the OR. Brian was a trooper and hung out with me in the pre- surgery room for more than two hours. Surgery prep involved all the usual things -- blood pressure, lots of questions about what allergies and medications, an IV, etc. and then they also rinsed my hip with iodine and stuffed me into some compression stockings to help prevent blod clots. I felt like some kind of creepy hospital clown with white thigh-high leggings, a faux-bronzed ass and a blue shower cap on my head. Dr. Seng came in twice and chatted with us and went over the procedure again. He told us the labral repair and osteoplasty were the easy parts -- it was making a determination about the cartilage damage that would be tougher. If it was "all cobblestone-y" he would probably have to debride some of it because it wouldn't be worth salvaging. Unfortunately, as we found out later, there was some of that cobblestone shit in there. I told him I was lucky to have gotten out once last week on tele skis and he said not to worry it probably wouldn't be that great of a season anyhow. Right.

The anesthesiologist came in about 10 minutes before surgery and explained that I had two options -- a spinal or general. Given the length of the procedure and the fact that a spinal can be a longer recovery in terms of getting cleared to leave the hospital, I opted of course for general. I peppered him with my nerdy questions about whether he uses a brain monitor to make sure his patients don't wake up and he shut me up with a lot of smart statistics about how the brain monitors aren't very reliable anyhow. He said he had never had a patient wake up in 15 years. That sounded like a pretty reliable statistic to me. I listened to my meditation CD as they rolled me into the OR and even though the anesthesiologist said I wouldn't remember the time in the OR beforehand I actually remember virtually all of it. It was freezing and really loud in there -- they were playing some really bad music like Dave Matthews or something and they moved me on a couple of different beds while they got the machines started. Dr. Seng was there wearing his surgical cap and gumb boots on his feet of all things. A nurse said she was just giving me some oxygen when she dangled the gas in front of my face but I had heard that line before....and the next thing I knew I was waking up in the recovery room nearly 3 hours later. I was in recovery for a good hour or so before they wheeled me out to Brian and my Dad and Sam. I was pretty out of it but I knew when Brian didn't immediatley say anything that they must have found some pretty bad damage in the joint. He said the surgery had gone well but that Seng had confirmed that there was a fair amount of damage. I felt pretty bummed about that and couldn't think of much else for the rest of the day but I knew going into it that there was a pretty strong chance of that happenning. I never got a chance to talk to Dr. Seng because he left for the weekend while I was still out of it so I will have to wait until this week to hear the rest of the war story. Maybe in some ways that's good because I'm fairly sure that these painkillers are making me emotional too and I don't know how much more mediocre news I can take at the moment.

I've been recovering ok over the last four days and am trying to spend the recommended 4-6 hours per day in this passive motion machine (CPM) as directed. I was so sleepy the first few days that Brian would just stick me in it and I'd pass out with my leg slowly raising and lowering 5 times per minute. Sitting on the toilet turned out to be the worst of all the basic tasks that I had to try and accomplish in my gimp state. Needless to say, I think Brian and I crossed some relationship boundaries much earlier than we had anticipated...maybe as much as 30 years early! My Dad has been super helpful - taking our dogs for walks, running errands and cleaning the house so that Brian can spend the day at work and not worrying about me fumbling around the house on crutches. Our friends have been great and have brought us food so that we don't have to spend alot of time digging around for dinner, though I have to say I haven't had much of an appetite especially considering that my stomach has felt like cement since I got home from the hospital. Nothing like being sent home with a bottle of stool softeners to make you look forward to the pile of pills you'll be ingesting over the course of the week.

The hip is still pretty painful -- if I twist the wrong way or lean down too far I feel that familiar stab of pain in my groin or buttocks. When I finally took off the bandage today I was shocked by how small the incision sites actually were considering how many tools they crammed in there during the 3 hour surgery. Oh, and the 4 pages of pictures (arthro-porn) that he sent me home with are pretty unbelievable too. This is coming from someone who can barely thread a needle so the idea that someone else was able to stitch up a piece of flapping cartilage in the deepest joint in the body using a hole smaller than my pinky nail sort of blows you away.

Tonite, I'm supposed to get on the bike and start pedaling with no resistance just to work on ROM and keep the scar tissue from building up. Crutches to a stationary bike is sort of a funny prospect but we'll see how it goes.