Post Surgery Week 3: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Saturday, June 8

The last couple of days have been, if I may be so bold, pretty darn awesome.  No more TED stockings, no more walker, a little reduction in my meds, and a few other freedoms like being able to increase the length of my multiple-times-daily walks.  These are good things, all to be celebrated.

But combined with the good stuff is a dark and ugly side of my knee replacement saga:  the emergence of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the form of one bionic knee.

Now, Dr. Jekyll hangs around most of the day. He’s a pretty well-behaved knee, although he gets a bit cranky from time to time.  I keep him elevated and iced, stretched and strengthened, walked on and rested, medicated as directed:  in other words, all the things I have been prescribed to do.  I’m even at the point where I am able to drop my daytime dosage of my narcotic pain reliever.  Dr. Jekyll is the guy who gets gold stars at PT and at doctor appointments.

But Mr. Hyde?  Oh, he is one bad character!  He starts coming out in the evening hours, and by the time I crawl into bed, he’s taken full control of that &^%$# left leg.  Somehow he finds a way to ignore any and all pain relievers.  He wakes me up incessantly.  Well, actually, more to the point:  he doesn’t let me sleep at all.  There is no position that I can get into for more than say ten seconds that doesn’t end up hurting like hell.  This is the stuff that keeps me awake from two a.m. until six a.m. when exhaustion finally wins over pain for control of my body - but then it’s only a short-term victory.

Heather, the PA, was sympathetic when I saw her Thursday, but she also said this is a pattern that’s not going away in the next day or two.  She says that the pain is largely because of how much things stiffen and tighten up when I’m not up and moving, so her suggestion is to intentionally set timers to wake up in the night and to move as much as possible.

So now I’m working on what I’m calling Interval Sleeping, since it seems a bit like the intervals that my coach Benji Durden used to assign when I was marathon training.  I go to bed at 10 or 11, and pain wakes me up by 1 or 1:30.  I grab my trusty down pillow, go downstairs to the couch where the wedge that I use to elevate my leg is set up, turn on the ice machine, and settle in.  I fall asleep.  But then I have to wake up to take the ice off - too many warnings about frostbite suffered by people who sleep with the ice on too long - and pretty soon I’m massively uncomfortable again.  So I go upstairs and get an hour or so of sleep on the bed, until the pain wakes me up again.  Downstairs I go, pillow, wedge, ice machine.  I’ve been adjusting my pain meds so I have an extra dose available to me in the middle of the night, but I’m not sure that’s doing much good.  Sometimes I think that just taking a shot of whisky or tequila might be the better solution.

I’m praying that Mr. Hyde will (sometime soon!) recede into his dark and nasty shadows, and I can get in some nice LSDs (in running: long slow distance, in sleeping:  long slow dreams) instead of those exhausting Sleep Intervals.