So…I'm about a week and a half post-op now. I figured it might not be a bad idea to just quickly write up how life with the frame has been in general.
The answer is, not too bad. My pain has been pretty tolerable. By now I don't really need any pain medication, though I've still been taking Tylenol and some Valium at night to try to make sleep easier. In general, the hardest part of the whole process has been dealing with sleep and my ever-fluctuating energy levels.
Positioning the frame at night, I've discovered, is not nearly as easy as it should be, requiring copious amounts of turning and tossing about. It's hard trying to find a comfortable way to hold the leg when the frame adds so much bulk. Last night's tossing resulted in one of the pin sites springing a leak and spreading a solid amount of blood over the leg, which was a bit of an unhappy surprise to find in the morning (I didn't notice at all during the night). Beyond positioning, night is also when I start to worry more about the state of the leg—is one of the pin sites bleeding? what if I accidentally knocked my bones out of alignment? what if one of the pins is infected? While I normally do get to sleep at some point, it's been taking longer than I'd prefer.
The other major challenge is the fact that I really don't have the energy to do anything. A full day's activity will look something like going upstairs for a shower, taking said shower (getting cleaned up is one of the highlights of my existence at the moment since, because there's a set of stairs between me and the shower, it's not practical to shower more than once a day), returning downstairs, lurking on the couch for the rest of the day. Yesterday I took a scheduled trip back to the hospital for my first post-op appointment, which wiped me out for yesterday and today. Long story short, my activity is really, really limited. Lots of just resting and watching movies. Or television shows. I'm not picky.
As far as dealing with the frame itself, strut adjustments have been very straightforward. Though these adjustments are physically torquing my bones into alignment, they've been very easy on me. My mother, who's been in charge of doing the actual adjusting (I read off the numbers she sets the struts to), she can feel the resistance as she makes the adjustments. Again, though, no real pain. Even better: the corrections are now more than 50% done, assuming a new set of corrections isn't ordered at my next post-op.
Aside from one of the pin sites bleeding last night, the sites themselves are in fairly good shape and have been rather low-maintenance. Since coming home, they've had to be cleaned once, which, while not fun, was also not unbearable (I took out any discomfort by twisting a washcloth to its limit…that strategy, I might add, was quite successful).
Mobility-wise, since my left leg was not operated on at all, I'm able to hop around by either using my walker or using other people, sturdy objects or the wall for support. Having the frame dangling, though, is comparatively uncomfortable, so I prefer using my wheelchair with leg extension. Since getting around requires having other people help me, I've mostly been sticking to my couch.
At this point, I'm really just waiting for strut adjustments to be complete, at which point my bones can fill in the cuts which were made during surgery and I can have the frame removed. Also, I'm waiting for when I can leave this couch…
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