Clean at Last!

A week and two days after my surgery, I finally.....drum roll.....took a shower! In these days and times, NOBODY goes 9 days without showering, but I did out of necessity. You can sponge bathe all you want, but it can't compare to a shower. Really, it wasn't much of a problem. My incision has been dry since Sunday, but I wanted to be extra-careful and so waited until several more days had gone past before trying to shower. Even today, I wrapped my knee in plastic wrap to keep the incision and all the little pieces of "steri-strips" dry. With a shower bench and a hand-held shower wand, however, I managed just fine and felt oh, so happy to be really clean! After showering, I enjoyed an hour of leisure in my bedroom watching TV, fixing my hair, and organizing a few things. It was a pleasant morning!

The glitch in the morning came when I walked down the stairs (going up had been no particular problem). For whatever reason, I've been trying to avoid painkillers for the past 24 hours, but perhaps this is an error in judgement. Going down the stairs hurt--really, really hurt, and I was so exhausted by the effort that I collapsed on the couch and, as soon as Stan had iced down my knee, I promptly fell asleep for 2 hours. So maybe I should have taken a Percocet this morning, or at least some Tylenol. I really just don't know.

Before my surgery, I read as much as I could in a short amount of time about issues with TKR, and pain medications were right at the top of the issue list. I would amend that to say that medications that help with the swelling are a big issue, but between pain (which honestly hasn't been a big issue for me except when forcing my new knee to do something it doesn't want to do) and swelling, medication is an issue. No medication comes without side effects, and those side effects can sometimes make the benefits seem hardly worth it. This is obviously something I need to work out on my own, but if you have TKR (or any major surgery, from what I've read), you will deal with this issue.

It's the hottest day of the year, and I'm sitting here on my couch hoping that we don't have a brown-out, a black-out, or an air conditioner failure. If we can get through another couple of days, maybe the weather will moderate. That would make everyone happier!