Recovery and Rehab…the Early Weeks.

Today is (post-surgery) Day 25 and I have made lots of progress despite a few setbacks.

A few days before the surgery I rented and picked up a Game Ready ice machine to help get the swelling down the first few weeks after surgery.

Pain has not been much of an issue. I take a daily dose of meloxicam, but have not had to take a single dose of rescue medication (oxycodone). There was some dull achy pain particularly during the first week after surgery, but the ice machine was enough to handle that.

I left the hospital with a knee brace, which I was supposed to wear for walking and sleeping during the first two weeks. Being a “side sleeper”, I found it very difficult to sleep with the brace on. I adapted a bit, but was glad to jettison the brace after Week 2. Now I am sleeping on my side again, but still sometimes experience a bit of pain that keeps me awake. I put a small pillow between my knees while sleeping on my side to prevent any knee-on-knee violence.

I left the hospital with 2 crutches and a plan to return to walking without them in just a few weeks. However, some surgical complications have slowed my walking progress. I have a Baker’s cyst behind my right knee, which swelled in the days after surgery, causing me pain, stiffness, and pressure. That seems to have subsided, but I still am experiencing some numbness and tingling from the lateral side of my right knee all the way to the 3 smallest toes of my right foot. I am also experiencing “pins and needles” on the bottom of the right foot. It appears this is something I may be stuck with for weeks to months as a damaged or pinched nerve recovers. I have full movement in my foot, so I have been able to work around this problem a bit. I was supposed to be “toe touch” weight bearing for the first week followed by a week of “weight bearing as tolerated” while using crutches (or a single crutch). Just in the last 4 days, I have been able to move to a single crutch. I expect I’m just a few days away from walking without crutches. So, I’m a about 2 weeks behind the (rather aggressive) physical therapy plan to resume walking, but I’m okay with that since I am making progress.

Other aspects of my rehab have been going well. My range of motion has been improving with physical therapy (close to 130 degrees now) as well as my quad strength. At the end of Week 2, I did a 10-minute cycling session during physical therapy that was borderline torture. I just barely had the range of motion to get the pedals to go around. Just 9 days later, I had progressed to an easy 30-minute ride on my road bike/trainer set up at home. My plan is to make easy cycling a daily component of my physical therapy program (…and my Physical Therapist agrees with this).

My physical therapy includes 2 visits to the physical therapist each week. The focus is on heel slides and heel blocks to increase range of motion (ROM) and exercises to increase quad strength (SLRs in all 4 planes, quad sets, ESR stimulation, isometric leg extensions, etc.). I’m also doing some flexibility/mobility exercises as well. I do 3 sessions of PT each day at home…usually one longer session (up to 1.5 hours) where I do all my exercises and 2 short sessions where I do a little bit of quad strengthening and ROM exercises.