Venturing Out on the Town

Tuesday's big adventure was going out to dinner at a local restaurant. At the time it was my longest excursion out of the house since I got home from the hospital a week and a half ago.

I was already in a bit more pain than usual before we went, but I thought the pain was more from muscle cramping from sitting in one position all day than from hip ache, so I took a Valium instead of an Oxycodone. Wrong choice. I was irritable, sleepy, uncomfortable in my chair, not very hungry and climbing the pain scale throughout the meal. What a terrible dinner date I was for my poor parents!

When I got home, I got a call from Dr. Millis. He wanted to check up on me at the two-week mark. Obviously he was catching me at a low point pain and mood-wise, but despite how awful I felt during the call, I tried to give him a broader picture of how I have been doing these past weeks and the progresses I have made.

The highlights of what he told me were:

-- if I am to undertake anything adventuresome (ahem, restaurant visit), I should prepare by taking extra pain medication beforehand (in this case one or two Oxycodone instead of one Valium) and not torture myself by going poorly protected, painkiller-wise;

-- he did not seem to be concerned about the amount of pain medication I am still needing (I was concerned because some of my PAO peers seem to reduce and even quit their pain medication so quickly, and I just don't think I can do it that fast, nor do I think I am being wimpy about my pain level);

-- I don't have to worry so much about overdoing the angle or the weight on the operated hip -- it will take more than such small things to do damage to the hip and its healing;

-- any grinding, shifting, popping, or clicking I may have felt are normal the first few weeks (I have felt none of those things.);

-- the dressing can come off any time now, the incision will be healed shut by now;

-- the numb spot will continue to recede.

Today I took the dressing off -- it is still hard to tell what the incision looks like because of the steri-strips. Mostly it looks like a 4.5" long mountain ridge curving down from where the iliac crest sticks out in front. Here is a photo; one of the steri-strips has peeled off already so you can see the actual incision there.

For orientation, the grey fabric is my pants, the top of the incision is where my hip bone would stick out really obviously if I were skinny like a supermodel, and the right side of the photo is the right side of my body. The yellowish tinges are from Betadine solution.

[Note, I've also added a post-surgery x-ray photo here, and going forward photos will be easily accessible in the Quick Links section at left.]

Tonight was another big adventure, attending a three-hour fund-raising event with my parents. Again I was already in a bit more pain than normal beforehand, this time because I'd stepped on the dog while swinging my bad leg off the couch -- the dog obviously jumped up and away, wrenching my leg as she moved. It hurt -- me physically and the dog emotionally.

This time I applied the lessons of Tuesday night and took two Oxycodone beforehand and had extra medication with me. (The fact that the event was a trivia competition and I was able to vigorously compete does prove my point that the Oxycodone does not make me foggy at all.) Although my team did not win, the night turned out well overall. My pain stayed very low until the last hour, when it started to increase and distract me. So clearly I can venture out a bit more, but as Dr. Millis suggested, I should be prepared with extra pain medication to avoid self-torture.