Knee Replacement Surgery – My Story 2 

Getting Ready – Pre-surgery Meetings

Once I accepted that I just have to go through with this surgery, it was time to confirm the surgery date and start the process. Sounds easy, right? But it was far from that. First – I waited 14 months for the surgery date – I guess there is a shortage of orthopedic surgeons in my area, combined with limited surgery time availability in local hospitals. Meanwhile, I was supported by my family doctor who continued to give me injections into the knee to lessen the pain and allow me to function as normal as possible. I tell you – in all those years of trying to first correct and then manage the pain have taught me a lot about what human being can do. So – I continued to be as active as possible – and that included golfing with some adjustments to my swing as well  using a cart instead of enduring long walk.

I also joined a brand new Athletic Club and tried several Sunset Yoga sessions (really hard since lot of the positions need a good knee to be effective) and Aquafit session – they were great!

Finally – I got he surgery date with about 6 weeks advanced notice. And in that time period, there were 2 meetings with various members of hospital staff to attend. This was the interesting part as much as it takes quite a bit of your time. Each meeting took about half the day – better part of it spent getting registered each time (sounds crazy and I really couldn’t understand why in this advanced technological age, registrations gets done over and over again – but that’s another story)

Finally, I met with a nurse, who explained hospital procedures step by step, physiotherapist who educated me on what was going to be needed immediately after the surgery and an anesthesiologist who gave me the options available. That last one was what I would consider the most beneficial, because I wasn’t aware that the surgery was possible to be performed using spinal procedure. As much as it sounds harder, believe me, the benefits of using spinal were pretty obvious to me. I will explain how it all went in future write up about the surgery itself.

In my second meeting (after going through the registration process again) I went for Xrays, ultrasound and had tons of blood taken from me – plus couple of other almost unmentionable tests performed.But I do believe that doing this pre-surgery stuff is a good idea – I couldn’t imagine having to go through all that after checking into the hospital for the surgery. hat would add at least another day to the hospital stay.

The one thing I actually enjoyed was an animated video about the procedure itself that the physiotherapist showed me. I tried to find one as close as to the one I saw and here is what I found:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8-nN8NV_5E[/youtube]

So – after the meetings and after doing numerous searches to get as much information as possible, I was pretty sure I was ready.

You are just going to have stay tuned for the next segments – I will do my best to paint as accurate picture as possible for you, although after going through this, the one thing I can tell you in all honesty is that you really cannot prepare yourself enough. But knowing this alone will help you – the trick is take it one step at a time and deal with individual situations.

And just in case you missed my first post in this story – here is the link to it:

Knee Replacement Surgery – My Story

I hope you are enjoying these series so far and I would love to hear from anyone who has either gone through the knee replacement surgery or has questions getting ready