Thursday, November 21, 2013

John Spends a Day Under Anesthesia .....

John finally had his knee worked on Tuesday morning, orthoscopic surgery with miniscus trim and some arthritis scrapped down.  We had to be at the day surgery place at 5:30 a.m., which if you know how far we live from there, meant we had to be up at about 4:00 a.m. to get ready and have time to get there. Arghhh!
We were the first people there -- the building was almost totally empty -- but the front desk person arrived about 15 minutes after us, and from then on it all went fairly quickly.
This is me staring at this bed while John's changing into hospital gown. Snicker! He's all like, "Why do I have to take everything off if they are only working on my knee?" Oh the mysteries of the hospital P&P manual......

John changed into his little hospital gown (tied in the back, of course!),was prepped and hooked up to the IV by 6:30 a.m. and he had answered the same little list of questions from about 6 different people! Funny! "Correct, the left knee." (with a warning not to say, "Right" in answer to that question!)  The nurse came in and gave him a little magic in his IV and they wheeled him away.

By 8:30 a.m. I was called back in to the recovery area where a very fuzzy John was waiting to go home.  A few final orders and then we loaded him on to a wheelchair and out to the car.  We drove through the parking garage gate and on the way home.  Whew!  That's over but the recovery was expected to take about 3 days.
In the car on the way home - ice on the top of the knee.

I think the worst part of the whole thing was John getting all of that anesthesia out of his system, he was a bit loopy most of the day -- it finally was gone by about 7 pm that night.  Some pain that day, so it wasn't that hard to convince him that he needed to take the pain meds, but he hasn't needed them since.  He took just Tylenol the next day and nothing today.  No pain other then some stiffness from the incisions (he has three holes in his knee with a couple of stitches in each one.) These should be healed and he can take all of the wrappings off Friday.  Here's hoping that he will have relief now from the knee pain he's been in for the past couple of years.  I'm glad he finally had this done.
John with Jeff's fancy knee icing machine!

Now...keeping him down in the chair for a few more days will be my biggest challenge.

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