I had my left hip re-surfaced by Dr. Gross last Wednesday and I'm happy to report that I'm feeling pretty great! So far, my recovery has been much better than I ever imagined. I was released from the hospital on Friday and we drove three hours to my sister's house in North Carolina. I'll continue to recover here all week before flying home to Utah on Saturday. Amazingly, I've had really no pain at all. I've taken nothing stronger than Tylenol so far. I truly can't believe it. But, I'm grateful for it. Today, I've started to use just one crutch to walk. I didn't intend to move to one crutch this soon. It just happened because I began to realize that the second crutch was really just in the way at this point.
Last week in the hospital, I was feeling pretty crummy. So, I'm really surprised that I've rebounded so quickly. My blood pressure and heart rate were really, really low and I think that was causing me to be very weak and nauseous all the time. Since leaving the hospital, my blood pressure has returned to normal, my appetite has returned and I've been feeling better every day. I had a hard time sleeping at first. But, each night gets better. Last night, I got a really good night's sleep. I've also been napping a lot throughout the day.
I'm not sure why my recovery has been so good and so free of pain so far. But, I think it might be because I went into the surgery in really good physical condition. After giving up so many sports over the last 12 years of pain, road cycling was the one sport that I could still do pretty well. In the months before my surgery, I rode many miles and regularly climbed my bike up all of our long and steep canyon roads. I think all that climbing really paid off. So, my advice is to try to go into the surgery in the best physical shape possible. I found cycling to be a great way to achieve that because it's not weight bearing and it happened to be the one motion that I could still do with my hip. It was bizarre. I could easily ride a century on my bike and climb several thousand feet in a ride. Yet off the bike, I could barely manage to walk around the grocery store.
The second piece of advice that I have is to ice your hip a lot. Dr. Gross sends his patients home with a really great ice machine thing. It's wonderful. I think icing my hip regularly since surgery has helped to eliminate pain and reduce the swelling. At the very least, it just feels great!
Dr. Gross is very conservative and I intend to follow all of his rules and be super conservative during my recovery even if I continue to feel this good. I'm very nervous about getting beyond the 6 month point without a fracture. So, I intend to be very conservative. If all goes well, I should be cleared to snowboard by March, but I might wait until next year to snowboard. I don't want to screw this up by doing something stupid too soon!
I was very nervous about doing this surgery and I did 6 months of research before choosing Dr. Gross and scheduling the surgery. By the way, I went with the uncemented Biomet device. The reasons that Dr. Gross and Biomet have pursued the development of an uncemented device make a lot of sense to me. My hunch is that they're onto something. I'm only 41 and I need a long term solution. Eliminating the long term weak link in the system makes sense to me. However, it is a risk. Everyone needs to make their own decision about this. It felt like the right decision for me. So far, Dr. Gross has put in about 300 uncemented devices.
So, that's my scoop! Another happy surface hippy . . . at least so far!
Thanks so much to Pat and all of the folks that have shared so much of their personal experience and thoughts on this forum! In the coming months, I'll try to do the same for others behind me in this journey!
Jeanie
Topic: New Gross Surface Hippy - 5 Days Post-Op!!! (Read 3153 times)
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