Baths are good!

Well, I had the stitches removed yesterday and got the photo sheets from the surgery. My Orthopedic Surgeon went over the procedure and answered some other questions I had. Of course, I forgot to ask one thing that I had been wondering about since the surgery which is why the small of my back and right butt-cheek is still numb, but I'll have to call and ask him that on Wednesday when he is back in the office.

Isn't that the way it always is? There's always one important thing that you forget to ask the doctor that you think of shortly after leaving his office. Has to be one of the corollaries to Murphy's Law or something...

From there I went right over to PT since I had missed a few days because of the tooth and all. Still dizzy as hell from the antibiotics and other medication, so it is actually good that I am still on crutches since I can't even sit upright without being dizzy and lightheaded. They put me through the same things I was doing before, but I was also put on the exercise bike for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes of pedalling at a very slow rate I had covered a whopping half mile and burned a staggering 1.5 calories. The glass of water I had afterwards probably took care of that. It took quite a few turns for me to get used to that range of motion, but once I managed to figure it out and they adjusted the bike properly it was, well, like riding a bike, I guess. Keep in mind that I haven't ridden a bike since I was a child and my folks sold my bike in a garage sale with the promise (that never came) of getting me a 10-speed.

Well, no wonder I'm overweight... No bike to ride, so I was stuck in the house playing video games and eventually getting into computers. Go figure! Later that day, after the numbness of the cold treatment from PT wore off, I noticed my knee was feeling weird. It hurt more than it had in a while, and not just the obvious slight sting of where the sutures were removed. This morning I feel like I'm back to where I was a week ago. My whole knee area is throbbing, and I can feel my knee slipping every time I put even the slightest weight on it. Also, while doing my at-home exercises, my knee keeps popping and clicking a lot, and I've got pain there again. I'll have to address that on Wednesday when I go back. I hope I didn't overdo something, or something more stupid like sleep on it wrong. I'd really rather not have to go back to keeping it in the immobilizer.

I think a couple of little bits of the sutures in my gums came loose today when I rinsed my mouth with the saltwater. I guess that's normal if they're supposed to come out on their own eventually. Who knows what I do with them in my sleep. Between the tossing and turning and not being able to get comfortable and my grinding my teeth and my tongue running across the area I'm surprised I have any at all. There are lots more of them in there than I originally thought. Some in my gum at the front above where the tooth was, the obvious (real long) ones hanging down from the empty space, as well as some at the back of my gum and roof of my mouth near the area. What did he use for the cutting, a small chain saw? I suppose now that a lot of the swelling has gone down, the skin is drawing in and making the stitches more obvious. The good thing is I haven't seen any more blood coming from up there, so that's good. I'm only slightly worried about getting a dry socket since I had them before when I had 5 broken wisdom teeth cut out. I purchased my own little bottle of Clove Oil, which is just what an oral surgeon uses for that problem. Trust me, if you've had dry sockets you know what I'm talking about, and I don't want to have to chase the dentist from suburb to suburb like I did when I had my Wisdom teeth removed years ago back in Nashville. Literally one ounce of prevention on hand.

Right now I'm about to do something that I have not done since before my knee operation on 12/4... Take a bath. Yes, that's right! Since the surgery I have been under strict orders to not allow my left knee/leg area to get wet. So it has been nothing but "sponge baths" (which actually don't involve a sponge at all, as it turns out, personal cleansing cloths, and whatever else we could come up with to keep me from being too gross and stinky without accidentally getting my knee wet. Heck, at one point I decided to wrap my knee in Saran Wrap and duct tape it up to see if I could stand up and take a shower. Once again, that is something that turned out to be a Bad Idea. I suppose it would be brilliant for someone who had 2 legs to stand on, but once I got inside the shower, I realized pretty quickly that balancing on one leg and having nothing else to hold on to was only going to wind up with an ambulance being called, so that experiment didn't last long. So, what I'm about to do is run me a nice warm bath and get clean. I'll wash off all the leftover sticky goop from the electrodes, wash away the cryptic ink markings that are still on my leg and knee, and wash away everything else that has accumulated on my body for the past few weeks and be truly clean. Then I think I'll run another tub and just soak until I look like a prune. May even eat dinner in there, who knows...