One week later

Post op day 7

It's already been a whole week since surgery! Golly gee.

This sucks. I don't recommend it to anyone. :( I'm having a feeling-sorry-for-myself kind of night but let me start from the beginning so you don't feel too deprived without the details of my entire day.

The day started, as usual, with downing some drugs. My drug of choice has (yay!) officially switched to Tylenol. I did not take a single percocet all day nor do I intend to swallow any more. Progress! I woke, really, to the call of my lovely mother offering to come visit me at lunch and take me to the food court under my building for a little outing. I happily agreed.

This invitation left me with precious time to get my morning activities out of the way. I had to go to the couch, ice and elevate (while checking email and facebook, of course) and then do my exercises. The bending is still very difficult for me and it's hard to say whether I'm making progress. Ooh hoo hoo.

After the exercises - think me sitting on my kitchen counter trying with all my might to lift my foot up from dangling position to the foot rest bar on my stool. Hey, it might be worthwhile to describe how the exercises feel. For one, I have no quadricep muscles left. Imagine the action of your foot when the doctor knocks on your knee with that knocker thing. Doing that on your own not as a reflex is a piece of cake, right? I can't do it. Only with great great effort can I even move my foot about one foot higher than its dangling place. It sucks. I've been working on resistance, with my good leg supporting my bad, and then pushing both against each other, trying to draw the bad one down into a bigger bend. I've also been doing some similar exercises with an elastic band thing. I think I'm around 90 degrees flexion but it's very hard to tell from my angle. I need someone with a protractor.

Anyway, I took a shower and got dressed just in time for my mother to arrive. But I was knocked out from the effort of those things alone. We went for lunch and again, the discomfort of sitting in the food court without full leg support was almost too much for me. I don't know how people go back to sitting at a desk at work with this leg. It's ridiculous.

After lunch (thanks mom!!) I came home, relaxed for a bit, and then had a bunch more visitors. Yorgos came to hang out, then D'Arcy arrived soon after.

D'Arcy gave me a lovely massage. She used to work in a physio clinic and she'd massage people's swollenness right out of their bodies. She worked on me for a while. It felt very nice and may have helped but the thing is still a swollen beast.

Here are the one week leg shots for you:

As you can see, the steristrips are still on so it seems like the stitches are not ready to come out, but I'm supposed to have them removed by my doctor. Hmm... any doctors around want to remove my stitches for me?

Wendy came over once again and the two girls took such good care of me. They made me dinner and cleaned up and kept me company and brought me ice and moved around furniture. I'm lucky to have such great friends.


We watched ridiculous TLC and 90210.


And we may have eaten some very sinful Mcsnackcream. Shhh. I'm going to get so fat, I'm sure.


Then Wend went home and Darce and I watched a very sad Israeli movie that had us both crying by the end. She stopped crying when it was over, but I had a little bit of an emotional breakdown.

Really, I can't walk. I can hobble around with my brace but without it I'm totally screwed. I know it will get better and I know people deal with a lot worse, but for a moment there tonight I just about lost it.

I'm really thankful for the people visiting me and for french fries, because without that I'd really go crazy.

How silly, eh? I'll be on my feet again in no time. It's just one of those days...