Kathryn's first outing

So last week I tentatively emerged from the house for two Very Important Activities. The first destination is rather obvious: PT. How could it be otherwise? That's where I was given Mission Impossible, namely to lift my leg off the ground. I'm sure it was an amusing sight to see me working as hard as any marathon runner, without even succeeding at getting my damn leg off the ground. It has taken about a week to conquer this mission, but I'm finally getting to the point of showing my leg who's boss. Fortunately my aunt was around to capture my moment of glory in a video:

Anyway, after PT (in which I did not get anywhere near to lifting my leg as in the above video), we headed out to the second Very Important Destination, which was something I've been waiting to be able to do for months: the grocery store. With the motorized cart. Obviously. Anne was there to film my tentative first attempts at getting situated with the cart:

Then she followed me through the fruit stands, where we promptly made asses of ourselves by searching for the Perfect Pose. I think the following turned out to be the best, thanks to the pineapples. I don't even like pineapple, but I'll concede they make a good prop for grocery store shenanigans:

From there we proceeded through the prepared foods area:

To get to the saddest department of all (for me):

Yes, the beer aisle. That's the saddest department because all of the Christmas specials are out and I can't have any of them. boo. I talked Anne into buying the Affligem de Noël, in honor of my routine of meeting Kari at the Café Descartes last year to drink it, haha.

From there we went to the regular part of the grocery store, where Anne thought it would be funny to film me driving down the row. Unfortunately we didn't think of filming me going backwards, as I was amused to discover that the cart beeps like a big old truck when you go backwards, haha. That will be our video project for next time, since there will always be a next time where Wegman's is concerned.

So there we have it. I'd say I left the place sufficiently terrorized, haha.

A day in the life

...of the Greatest Knee Surgery Ever. Disclaimer: there are two nasty-ass pictures coming your way, so if you don't want to see them, go away now. haha. If you are interested in seeing one more the more interesting surgical procedures out there, however, read on.

So, the good news on the surgery was that the surgeon was thrilled with the outcome and said I'm healing just perfectly (saw him yesterday). The bad news, of course, was the pain. It hurt like nothing has ever hurt before, and I'm comparing it to when I fell off my bike and shattered my wrist so badly that there was no bone connection between my arm and my hand. THAT was pain like I never thought I'd experience again (or at least hoped I'd never experience again), but this was still worse. I suppose it has everything to do with this picture:

There are a few interesting things going on in the above picture (which is not the nasty-ass one you've been warned about, those are coming up next). The front of my knee is to the left (the screws go front to back). You can see that big piece of bone all the way in the front, which is the part of the tibia the surgeon sawed off (called the tibial tubercle, it's where the patellar tendon attaches to the bone). Then you can see an extra wedge of bone that is nailed in the middle--that's the piece they took from my hip. To give you some scale, that piece of hip bone is about 12 cm long. So yeah, it's a big piece of bone we've got going on there, and it's having bizarre (but normal) implications on the skin on my shin. To wit: nerve damage that's supposed to last for about 6 months and a rash that the surgeon said could be caused by the skin adapting to having the bone closer to the surface (I'm not sure I understood that argument, I figured the whole leg would just get bigger, but maybe that's it, that the skin is stretched a bit more since the leg is bigger?). All I know is that I have a mild but itchy red rash all around my shin and that it feels weird to the touch.

So that was one procedure. The other one is the more interesting one (scientifically), but the pictures are significantly nastier. Here's a picture of under my kneecap, you can see the big old hole there:

I think the fleshy stuff around the kneecap is like skin tissue or something, I know he opened my leg all the way up and flipped the kneecap over. So then he took a collagen tissue of some sort (comes from a pig) and sewed it over the hole, to form a water-tight seal:

After that, he injected the cloned cartilage cells underneath that pigfat (haha). I have pictures, but it looks exactly the same as the above one. So now that's what the underneath of my kneecap looks like.

So the question that remains, then, is what all this means for my daily existence. And the answer is contained in the following picture:

That's my CPM (continuous passive motion) machine. For my next stunt, perhaps I'll have it videoed so you can see what it's like when it's moving. It goes very slowly, up and down, to keep my leg from getting stiff. I'm only allowed to go 45 degrees at this point, and the gentle motion is also apparently good for stimulating cartilage growth. I'm supposed to be in it 8-12 hours per day. ouch. I'm doing a good job of keeping up with it, however, because any time I think of cutting a corner I remember how godawful the first few days after the surgery were, and that reminds me how much I do NOT want to have to do anything like this EVER AGAIN. I am going to be the best rehab patient ever, so that I didn't go through hell for nothing.

And having the cat around always makes things more amusing anyway. Here's another shot of me with the cat, mainly because I couldn't resist. And it gives another good impression of how big he is:

Otherwise, when I'm not in the machine, I'm doing my PT. I have to be careful getting around, as one of the bracelets the hospital slapped on me was that I'm a "fall risk":

No shit! haha. My mother said it was written on my hospital door too, but I was too drugged up to notice. Anyway, PT mostly involves my stim machine and squeezing a ball between my legs. I'm also working on straight-leg raises, which I'm still trying to get going right. I barely got my leg off the ground today, but it was way better than before, when I was desperately trying to lift my leg and it didn't look like I was doing anything. Anyway, here's me with my machine:

And yes, that's the incision going down the front of my leg. Fun times. I can post a close-up if there's demand for it, but I thought the images from inside the knee were perhaps enough for now!

Anyway, I will close with another (gratuitous) picture of the cat, mainly because my Blogger interface is acting up and I can't seem to move it to the above discussion. The picture is apparently intent on staying here, so whatever, I'm not going to waste my energy fighting Google, haha. We bought me one of those hospital-style tables to go over the bed, but Sebastian thinks that's mighty fine for him as well: