The Surgery….Finally!
I finally had my surgery on 2/7/14, almost a full year since it started! The Surgeon cut my AT in a long Z shape then slide the pieces apart and sewed the two top pieces together. My husband and I were under the impression that I would be up and walking around right after the surgery. This is what the surgeon was saying when I had the appointment to set up the surgery. Now that I know more about the whole process, I guess he was talking about after I was FWB but, he did not break it all down for us very well. So we were getting ready to leave the surgery center and the nurse asked if I had crutches or something since I was NWB. She told us about the knee scooter and we went straight to the medical supply and rented one. I absolutely love this thing and I recommend it to anybody that has had this surgery!
The surgeon put me in a boot, not a cast, he said with a cast there’s more of a chance of it rubbing or cutting me and causing an infection. I took the boot off once and that was to try on a different boot but, I quickly put the original one back on. My foot is very padded over the surgery area then wrapped with an ace bandage. I have no desire to try and sleep with the boot off or any of that. I am a bigger woman, non athletic and all I want is to be able to walk normally to my bathroom and back. I am not gonna risk injuring this thing or tearing it and having to start all over.
The days following the surgery were very rough. There was a lot of pain and since I was already on pretty strong pain meds there wasn’t much that was stronger. The hardest part was getting to the bathroom. I used the scooter to get there but, our bathroom is very small so I couldn’t turn the scooter around in there. The key to keeping the pain down was to keep the foot propped up above my heart and keeping ice on it. You can’t get the ice pack in the exact area of the incision so, they showed me a trick at the surgery center. If you put the ice pack higher up on your calf from where the incision is, the cold will travel down and still work on the incision area so, I would just tuck the edge of the ice pack in the top of my boot cast and I was good to go.
I do recommend staying on top of that pain medicine those first 4 or 5 days. Take it every 4 or 6 hours, depending on how it’s prescribed, I would even set the alarm on my phone and take it in the middle of the night. The other thing I recommend is getting some of those orange juice drink boxes and drink a couple a day to help keep your potassium up so you don’t get the muscle cramps in your calf as bad. I would get the cramps when I got on the scooter after laying down for a few hours. When, I would bend my leg up to knee to kneel on the scooter is when I would get them really bad.