I made it to the computer!

Hello! :)

Just wanted to update everyone on what all has been going on with me, for those who care, anyway! LOL :D This is going a lot of places, so it's semi-generic ;)

First off, many thanks for the kind words and offers, prayers and well-wishes from everyone! Knowing that you were out there thinking about me helped me get through all this stuff. I deeply appreciate being in everyone's thoughts!

I'm at home, doing better each day overall, and my days go like this...

Get up and do rehab exercises they give me from PT first thing every morning. One of them is to push my knee over and hold it to help everything "grow back" right. This one is the weirdest, also somewhat painful and squishy feeling!

Then I get in 4 hours on the CPM if I get up early enough. It's about the size and weight of a big server, so my wife has to set it up on the couch or bed and then get my leg strapped in. I'll take a picture of it. It's a pain...

If not, I'll have to do the whole 8 hours when I get back from PT. 8 hours is pretty much nap time, or book reading time, so I like to break it up into 4 hours at a time, or it is pretty annoying. Just imagine for yourself...

Then my wife takes me to PT Mon-Fri. There they do all the post-op rehab stuff and come up with new things for me to build up strength and all. I've got a lot of swelling still (can barely get into my shoes, etc.) so they can't push me hard to putting a lot of weight on the leg for now. Still on crutches and am able to get around on them a LOT better than I thought I would after the first try in the hospital. LOL!

Then before I go to sleep, my wife has to put my leg in an immobilizer so I can't injure it when I sleep. I really haven't been sleeping well at ALL, even when I was in the hospital on the all-the-morphine-you-can-click diet, so you can imagine that at home between the immobilizer, having to sleep on my back, and the CPAP I already use, it is useless. I tend to wake up every hour. It's annoying, but I catch naps in the afternoon when I can and on weekends.

Funny, I really thought I'd have time to catch up on some reading, write some letters, talk on the phone, and use the computer more. Truth is, all this trying to get better is pretty difficult work! :( Ah well... Tell you what, if I didn't need the money so much, I'd take a vacation after all this, because we could sure use one! LOL!

On the 24th (seriously, that is what my Dr. scheduled!) I'm getting my stitches out and also another follow up at that time. My Dr. is great. He was there checking on me every day while I was in the hospital, and he works closely with the PT folks. He's really good. One nice thing about having the stitches out is that I'll be able to get my leg wet so I can take a real bath or maybe even a shower! Yes, it's the little things that you miss the most. Granted, it's not like I'm hanging at a Tibetan monastery with no hot water and smelling like a Yak, but turns out I am a lot cleaner than I even give myself credit for!

After that, he'll make a determination on this or that and I'll have a better idea of when I'll be back to fully functional status. :) Currently, my wife has the big-fun tasks of bathing me, helping me get dressed, bringing me food, drink and medication; generally being my home-health-care nurse sans pay. Heh, not that I need proof that she loves me after over 12 years of marriage, but she's really gone the extra mile to help me through this! :)

Also, for those who wonder what was done, here are some (possibly gory) details:
The surgery is done arthroscopically. Three very small incisions were made around my kneecap. One of the incisions is for the bar that lifted my patella (kneecap) up, the second is for the arthroscope, and the third is for the other surgical instruments. The first thing that gets done is the removal of all the frayed, dead cartilage that had developed from years of my patella being misaligned. A tiny little cylindrical shaver spins around and cuts off the bad cartilage (think Dremel tool...). After the bad cartilage was removed, the patella was cut away from the iliotibial band (think really gross...) and repositioned so that it is in re-alignment with the joint. Also they found I had a tear in my lateral meniscus, so it had to be cut out and repaired. ACL was a bit frayed as well... Go figure! I'm getting my copies of the prints on the 24th. They will be gross, so don't look at them if that stuff upsets you! :) Hopefully I can get them scanned and all. And no, I don't know why they didn't use a digital camera... LOL! :) [note: scanner broke so use your imagination]

Well, that's it for now. Kinda hard to be comfortable sitting in this chair and all for very long, for those who wonder why I haven't been on IRC and such more, or answering my emails directly. I'm working on it...

Thanks again for all the support! :)

Peace!