Too Hot for Anything

Oh, my! Will it ever be cool again? It doesn't have a lot to do with my recovery, but I must comment again on the oppressive heat. We set a record for this date with a reading of 103 this afternoon. In a way, it does have something to do with my recovery because I would very much have enjoyed going somewhere today or I would have enjoyed taking a walk outside. With this heat, however, there's no way I'm going to go anywhere. Even in perfect health I don't do well in the heat, and feeling a little less-than-perfect, there's no way I'm going to go tromping around outside in this hot weather.

Since I started this blog with the intention of giving insights/advice about daily life after TKR surgery, I will not dwell too much on the medical aspects. I will say briefly, however, that I took it easy today because this was the first day after my stitches had been removed. My incision looks fine but I wanted to be careful not to harm it now that there are no stitches and no steri-strips to hold it together. For that reason, I did all my strengthening exercises but skipped the exercises that would have stretched my knee cap, thus endangering the incision. Because of not exercising quite so much, and because of the heat, I tried to walk a lot inside the house--around and around and around the family room to kitchen to dining room down the hall, and then all over again.

So what did I do on this 17th day since surgery? I had my bran flakes breakfast, checked email and browsed the news on the internet, then did my exercises at the urging of Coach Stan. After going upstairs for a shower and a little TV, I came back down and sort of wasted time until lunch. Stan ate an early lunch, then left to go run errands and go swimming. I ate a light lunch (the chickpea salad I made two days ago), then retired to the cool office/bedroom to read (Charles Dickens' "Sketches of Young Couples") and eventually to nap for a VERY long time. I shouldn't have slept so long because I suspect that I'll have a hard time sleeping through the night but that's what I did. Unlike the first week to 10 days after surgery when I slept off and on all day and then slept all night, I'm returning to more normal sleep patterns now. But, once school starts in three weeks, how will I ever get through a day without a nap?

The last bit of information I'll record is that I tried an experiment today--no Percocet at all. I took an ibuprofen this morning, another ibuprofen after lunch, and an Extra Strength Bufferin right before dinner. I will take another Bufferin before I go to sleep, and hopefully this will be sufficient to keep my few little aches and pains enough under control to sleep comfortably. Percocet still will have a place in my life (before physical therapy), but on a daily basis, I hope to use it little or not at all.

That's it--time to go to a cooler room and try to feel a little more refreshed. Is it autumn yet???