Surgery Minus 5 Weeks - And We're Off!

I received a surgery date last Friday. I will have a total knee replacement on April 1, 2008 at 9:30 a.m. I'll be getting a DePuy Rotating Platform Knee. My surgeon said if he were getting a replacement, that is the one he would choose. He's in pretty good shape and seems to be fairly young, and I trust his judgement. He said not everyone should have this knee, but it should be good for me.

Other than my joints and muscles falling apart at an alarming rate, I'm in good health. Blood sugar, blood pressure, lungs, heart, cholesterol, triglycerides, liver profile, protein, calcium, BMI/weight are all normal. I do have lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia along with osteoarthritis.

I am 52, 5'10, and have valgus (knock knees.) I don't know the degree, but I look like an upside-down Y when I stand. My surgeon tells me that I should be very happy with the pain relief and regained function after the knee surgeries. (I'm getting them done one at a time.) He says my knock knees will be gone, and I will gain about an inch in height. I wonder if I'll look thinner, since my BMI will be lower. :-) My Tanita Scale says my body fat is 15.8%. Hahahaha. I don't think so. I've got more than 15% fat in my head. A few months ago, it gave me a 12% reading. Maybe when I was born...

I have 5 weeks until surgery. I am starting some leg strengthening exercises today. My knees have been bad for so long that my muscles are weak. We'll see how this goes. I don't think I've been able to squat since college. I was really hard on my knees: volleyball, skating, cheerleading, lots of falls and injuries.

Working at camp one summer, we were doing some gawd-awful extreme athletic course before the campers arrived. One exercise was to get on a tire hanging from a rope, high above the ground. Get the tire swinging. Swing it over to another tire hanging from another tree several feet away. Scramble from the first tire to the second. Yeah, right. Sounds easy?

While scampering from the first tire to the second, I realized I was going to fall, so I put my right leg out straight to catch m'self. The right kneecap went sliding off to the right side and stayed there. Owie. Big owie. I spent the first few weeks of camp on crutches, and my knee never fully recovered. This was the year Elvis died.. '77? Something like that. It was my second year working at this camp. It's probably not a good advertisement to have the Games Specialist on crutches, but I got through it.

Anyway, things only got worse from there. Wear and tear. Weight gain, weight loss, repeat. Add in a nursing career and things got even worse. I'm sure that I am no different from others who need knee replacements. We all wear out eventually.

I will try to keep this updated. I really enjoyed reading another blogger's details about his knee replacement surgery. Maybe I can pay it forward here.