must. keep. blogging.

Post op: three weeks and one day

It's been three weeks! And here I am, still alive.

I haven't been diligently blogging, but here's what's up on the knee scene.

For one, I've totally ditched the crutches. I am now crutch free and loving it! I've seen THREE different people using crutches since Monday, if you can believe it, and felt a marked affinity towards them, though they couldn't tell that I too am one of them.

My current focus has been trying to walk without a limp, and it's more or less working I think. The effort is kind of funny. I have to be conscious of swinging my arms because in my attempt to walk without a limp I end up holding my arms very still. This looks bizarre, in case you've never noticed it.

I have two newish difficulties now, too. The first is stairs. Going up I'm not too bad. I can use both feet and walk slowly but normally, though when my operative leg is the one stepping up, my muscle has to really work hard to lift the weight of my body. I guess that must be due to the weakness of my quads and hamstrings. Going down the stairs is much worse than that because my operative knee simply hurts when I do it. Sometimes I do it anyway, sometimes I step down with only my left and look like a bit of a weirdo, and sometimes I use railings to lower myself down. It depends on my mood.

The other difficulty is that after any prolonged walking my whole leg hurts. Actually I'm kind of in a state of constant "uncomfortable-leg". My calf muscle and the muscles in my thigh are all tense and angry, maybe because they're getting used to being used again, but it hurts in a nagging kind of a way and I don't enjoy it.

Despite this I've returned to my normal work and play schedule, ish. I think about my knee probably 90% of my waking hours. This week I have been biking at the gym twice as well as doing a few other things (leg press, ab work, leg lifts, whatever I can think of, stretching, sometimes arms) and I've managed to activate the audio on the televisions! I noticed a big improvement on my range of motion while biking on Monday, after a few days off over the weekend.

The incision is so close to being completely closed and scab-free. I hope to go swimming this week still. Maybe Friday after physio. I stopped by the pool on my way to the gym today (it's really so close!) and found out the lane swimming hours. It appears that swimming there is free. Is that even possible?

Oh, and before I go, I promised to talk about weight gain and knee surgery. Well. I was sure that I'd been packing on the pounds as I lazed around the house eating too much of very unhealthy things. But when I stepped on the scale the other day I was three pounds lighter than I think I was before surgery. I think the explanation is that I've lost some amount of muscle mass and along with that I've lost tone. I'm basically becoming one flabby girl.. but I don't care because it's just the numbers on the scale that count!!!! wink. wink.

Sleeping time.