
Originally Posted by
Lizardacres
I feel like I have turned a corner in my recovery at this point and things are easier. The first three weeks were rough, no way to sugar coat it. For me, the biggest hurdle was proper pain control. There was a poster a while back that insisted to her surgeon ahead of time that she wanted a pain management specialist on her medical team to write her orders for pain control in the hospital and he found one for her (turned out to be the anesthesiologist).
If I had done this, I feel my recovery would have been much smoother and more comfortable. This is the one thing I would have done differently given the chance and I would encourage everybody to take this approach. The problem with leaving this to chance is that you will have multiple persons writing med orders while you are admitted; your surgeon, his assistant, the hospitalist, etc. and they don't necessarily communicate well with each other. You may be asleep when they come by and not have a chance to tell them how you are doing so they may be getting their information from the nurses. Also, I think that leaving a lot of discretion to the nurses as to what you can have and how much you can have leaves you at the mercy of a single person for 12 hours that may not be caring enough or very competent and that is not a chance I would want to take again.
I don't mean to denigrate the nursing profession as there are wonderful, caring nurses out there, but you might not be lucky enough that all your nurses fall into this category. My discharge meds could have been better also. I had to have them changed a couple of times and part of the problem was that what I requested was not communicated to the person who actually wrote the orders.
I have just graduated to taking walks outside without support. I never did use the walker outside as it gets hung up on the sidewalk, so all along I have just been holding on to my husbands arm, which worked much better. I was really pretty wobbly the first couple of weeks and though maybe it was because I was anemic at discharge, and while that might have been part of it, now that I am walking on my own I realize that I am having to learn to walk all over again in a different way so there was more to it than that.
Before surgery, I had lumbar kyphosis and my lower back stuck out to the rear when I walked and I was leaning forward some. Now I have lumbar lordosis, my head is centered over my pelvis again and my quads are rather weak. I have to really focus now when I walk; butt now sticks out to the rear and stomach is forward. It feels so unnatural! Now I know why they want you to walk - it's a lot of work to learn to walk with your new bone structure. Has anybody else experienced this?
I'm up to taking two 1-mile walks daily and I'll probably keep it there until my next post op visit at the end of the month. I'm trying to focus on how I walk and relax into my new posture. It's a whole new world. It's amazing to be able to stand again without pain. Sitting is still a challenge, I need to use a chair where I can sit up perfectly straight and even then, I get tired after a while and have to lay down. Also, I find I have to change positions a lot to stay comfortable. Guess it will be a while before I am ready to return to work.