How to Reduce Recovery Time After Knee Replacement Surgery

Schedule your first post-op appointment for at least a week before they say you should.
We were cleared for take-off today from husband Roger's knee surgeon in Philadelphia, who said his knee was, well, unremarkable for its being a mere five weeks after the total replacement. (Six weeks is the prescribed time for the first post-op. ) And where were we off to? Colorado, then California. "Give me a call if there's anything. ANYTHING. There's just me, the wife, and a lame dog. " Roger wondered why a knee surgeon couldn't do anything for his lame dog; I wondered why the doctor would willingly give us his cell phone number. He essentially gave us a free pass to call him if there was ANYTHING, as the rest of his family was apparently keeping him pretty unbusy despite that the dog could probably use his expertise. He mumbled something about liking us; we asked good questions or something.

Get prescriptions for physical therapy. The more the better.
No problem with getting two Rx's for physical therapy. One for Colorado, one for California for when we get there, the date not yet known with certainty. "I'll leave the date blank. You can fill it in." Now there's an accommodating doctor. (I stopped short of asking him for a few blank scripts.) Physical therapy helps to strengthen the new knee and get everything working well together in there. Engage the professionals; don't leave the physical therapy for yourself. And walking around the house doesn't count.

Entrench confidence in your surgeon and pat yourself on the back for choosing the best of the best.
The surgeon gave us the feeling that if any one of those two knees gave us a problem, just call him up and he'd fix us up with another one. One hopes never to have to make that call. We were impressed but he was completely nonchalant about taking a leg apart and putting it back together in 30 minutes flat. Two knee replacements ought to be the upper limit for one human being, although the number of redos encountered in the hospital was surprising; thankfully, none of them was caused by our surgeon. How many replacements can you get if you come into this world with only two knees to begin with? So, nice guy. Aw shucks attitude. Competence up the gazoon. Humble, unassuming. The greatest doctor. But we hope to never see or speak to him again.

Try to impress the P.A. (physicians assistant), the person of real power in the doctor's office.
Before the doctor comes in to see you at your post-op appointment, the PA sees you, takes all the data from you about your recovery, writes it down, and delivers it to the doctor, who can better spend his time with you as a social visit. Roger's surgeon employs three totally competent individuals as PAs, who could easily be very good physicians themselves. Today, our PA was Melissa (I think. I forgot her name as soon as we were introduced. Nothing personal. Happens with most everybody. Unfortunately, doesn't go far in trying to impress the PA), who could as easily have been a runway model as a physician: tall, blonde, very slender, attractive in her white coat and stiletto heels, bare legs, no nylons a la Demi Moore in that 1990s movie where she turns on all the guys in the office. Her capacity for information was astounding. She went from A to Z, "you'll need PT," and rattled on in rhyme and free speech, talking to and collecting information from Roger like a RAM bus, spewing instructions to him, and leaving me in the dust with all the data flying verbally in the room.

Tell how well the fracture blisters healed.
After many moments of their technical talk-a-thon, Roger and the PA were on the subject of the enormous fracture blister that arose on his knee post surgery and how its golf ball size impressed even the most seasoned RNs on the floor. The blister had oozed its contents onto a pillow at home (remember "Duck Down?" Now you know the real reason for the new pillows), dried up, epithelialized, shed the scab, and healed as if it were never there. "Take a look at this." At the time, I wondered why Roger was showing me an old paint chip. It was the scab (textured "Persian Magenta" by Sherwin Williams. Just kidding). It fell off his leg intact onto the bathroom floor and we marveled--unsightly as the scab was--at the dermatological miracle of the new skin emerging from underneath. The scab was the subject of our intellectual inquiry as to how human skin could morph into something so decidedly unhuman-looking. And now Melissa was rather nonchalant about the dermatological miracle and her trained eye would not skip over the shadowy trace of where the horrendous blister was. If we couldn't impress her with the remarkable ugliness of the gargantuan eruption, we got her to notice and acknowledge the remarkable healing, even if she could tell where it used to be.

Set stretch goals for your recovery.
So, everything with the knee was normal, as expected, fine, doin' goooood, okee dokee, and et cereral okays coming from the surgeon and the PA. Turning on her stiletto heels to leave the room, "enjoy your flight" was her well wish for our immediate future. "We're driving." This got a rise. "You're DRIVING to Colorado?" Left unexpressed, but clearly showing through, was her astonishment at a 2300-mile drive in a car after so little time after a major surgery. "Yes. Then to California. It'll be our eighteenth cross country," I said, exaggerating the count only a little, or more accurately, not knowing it at all. Clearly, only matters outside the medical field can impress anybody in this doctor's office.

Don't forget your airport security card...
or you'll be setting off all the metal detectors in the airport. You'll set them off anyway or you'll be searched head to toe anyway despite the card that authenticates your metal knees. Somehow, your titanium won't show up on the screen or the security people won't know what they're looking at. Your surgeon's PA will bestow a card to add to the bulging credentials already in your wallet. And you can proceed to fly anywhere in the world although they'll probably still search you.

Be happy.
"On the road again....doo do dooo do dooo dooo....on the road again. Do dah do do DOOOO do......
I can't wait to get on the ro--oad again!" --Willie Nelson

After all, we've got TWO good legs to stand on now!