Post-Op Day 3 - First Check Up

Going in to see Dr. Kim today. The first day out of the house since the surgery. Dr. Kim pictured with me bewildered that I'm still alive.

Last night was better than the night before. I actually was able to sleep for about 7 hours. I'm sleeping on the couch with my ice machine running full blast and the CPM machine going at 30 degrees incline. Yesterday I was at 40-45 degrees but it was too painful to sleep with that range of motion. When the knee is idle doing nothing, it gets surprisingly stiff fairly quickly. The next time the knee is moved or I start up the CPM is not fun at all. Feels like I'm breaking little strings as my knee gets back into motion.

By the way, the numbness in my good leg is gone as well as the numb bladder control. Yeehaw.

Big V. Let's talk about the pain medication Norco/Hydrocodone/Vicodin. This stuff is wicked. I'll be honest, the first two days I really didn't appreciate what the Big V does until about 2:30am last night. I woke up in quite a bit of pain. I'm prostrate on my back with my butt on a large pillow and another pillow under my back and the knee is in the CPM doing its thing. The knee is always at heart level or higher. I have always had trouble sleeping on my back because I get vertigo. So this whole leg strapped to this CPM setup is doing a number on my mind. I find myself experiencing vertigo each time I go to sleep. Back to Big V. I took a drink of Gatorade and decided that though I couldn't eat anything (I couldn't get up to get any food), I'm going for the V. I took 1 pill, waited about 15 minutes and the next thing I knew it was 6 am and I was out cold. The only reason I woke up was because I was hot. I find that the V makes me hot, temperature wise people, temperature. I wonder if that's a side effect. I slept well to about 6:40 am and then I decided to jump on the blog and write for a while. Good night over all.

I'm going to Dr. Kim's office today for my first post-op appointment. He's going to change my ice machine to a better one and rewrap my bandages which are barely intact. Not sure what happened but the knee wrap wasn't done that well from the hospital.

Dr. Kim is a stud. Michele drove me up to his office in Temecula. We were late leaving the house but we made it there in record time. Turns out Michele likes the gas pedal! Right honey? So in the car I apologize about 50 times for being such a baby and whining all the time. Seriously I'm completely sick of myself whining about the pain, the knee, the rehab. Shut up Chad. The problem is that I can't help it. That's how I communicate with what's going on with me. I let it all out. Terrible excuse. I'm Chad and I'm wimpy. So, I popped a Big V pill during the car ride and from what I can recall I was almost passed out the whole way to the office. We arrived to Dr. Kim's office and waited for about 10-15 minutes (again time sort of stood still for me) and my name was called.

I stumbled up on my crutches and was struggling a bit as I entered the hallway to the patient room when Dr. Kim saw me. He scolded me for not putting weight on my severely destroyed and hacked up knee. I stopped and looked at him like he had 4 heads. Put weight on my knee? Are you kidding me? Are you totally mad? Turns out my knee is as stable as it will ever be and the trick is to get the rest of the tissue and muscles to heal up and get in shape. So I tried to put some pressure on the knee and the pain was almost 4 letter word pain. The photo to the right tells the story. I slowly hobbled in and got on the patient table. Dr. Kim also told me that I needed to be at 60 degrees on my CPM asap. I'm at 45 degrees and I thought that was painful! He said I need to push it and get to 100 degrees by next week. Yea right. I'll try to get there - doctor's orders, right?

Dr. Kim took off the badges and inspected the knee. I had thought that orthoscopic surgery was minimal and only 1 incision about an inch longer was made. Wrong big time.

There were several inch long incisions and they are all held together with staples. Seriously staples. There's no plastic surgery I take it with the ACL operation. Just bands of steel holding together flesh. The knee was fairly swollen as you can see. We took some pictures of the knee for the blog and Dr. Kim even posed for a photo. He wrapped up the knee and put on the new and improved ice machine wrap and we were done. He said the operation went well and that my knee was fixed. All I have to do is rehab the leg and get it back in shape. That's all???

I have some allergies to wheat and seafood. Around the wounds and other areas of my leg, I was having a fairly bad reaction to something. There was some discoloration and some blisters especially around the incisions. From the time I got home from the operation I knew that something was bad because I was having an allergic reaction usually reserved when I eat shellfish or seafood. I couldn't figure out why I was breaking out. I thought that stress was causing my auto-immune system to go haywire. On the way home from the doctor's office, it hit me so hard as to why I was having such an allergic reaction. Iodine. Iodine is very heavy in shellfish and seafood. Iodine is also used to treat wounds and as an anti-bacteria solution especially during and after surgery. After I came home, I undressed the bandages and cleaned off my whole knee and especially the wounds from all iodine and applied some prescription anti-bacteria cream instead. That should do the trick. From now on I'm going to remember that iodine is indeed a medicine and I need to list that as something I'm allergic to.

Now I'm just chilling on the couch getting ready to play Forza Motorsport 3 that I got from the two coolest high schoolers/varsity scouters, Weston and Jadon. I already pounded my Jamba Juice. Thanks guys. Getting ready to watch some NCAA action this evening.

I have my knee hooked up to the new ice machine and it works really well. I'm going to push to 60 degrees by tonight. We'll see. I'm still pretty wimpy.

A few photos for the few who dare. Yes those are steel staples holding the hamburger together.