It's a new year! 5 weeks post op

Really, only 5 weeks have passed? I feel like it's been months now since I came home from surgery...I guess that's a good thing in it's own way. It means I'm finally getting a little stir crazy and wanting to do things a little bit more than previously. We are now in the New Year, 2011 and I wish I could say it's just a year of healing and no looking back, but things are still kind of up in the air with the right hip...oh well, I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Best not to dwell on it now and think positive thoughts!

As for how my left hip is doing post PAO, I am finally prescription pain pill free! I still have to take extra strength tylenol and motrin a couple times a day and occasionally a valium when my psoas and IT band spasm (from the fall) and had it not been for the fall I would have stopped taking vicodin before Christmas. I do have an intense ache that wasn't in my psoas area and IT band area before the fall and it makes it really hard to get comfortable in any position and it really flares up at night, so falling asleep can be challenging. I hope that this will resolve within the next couple weeks. I do heat and ice alternatively which works really well and of course I keep up with the stretches/exercises I was given.

I am going to admit to a naughty thing though....yesterday I wanted to test out my left hip and so I stood on both hips with equal weight (crutches at the ready) and then started to put more weight on the left than the right hip. Well that lasted all of 1 second! I had a bad pain and weakness in the left knee that nearly had me falling to the floor. So, I suppose I'm not quite ready for that yet! The hip didn't hurt though that I noticed!

I don't have a whole lot of new things to report that I can do. I am able to roll onto my right side in bed or the couch with ease and I can roll onto my stomach with ease and even flip back over to my back now. This just started happening early last week! I'm so happy for a change in positions. I still require tons of pillows and even though I have pillows stuffed between my knees, it still pulls on the IT band quite a bit and makes it hard to get totally comfortable. But it's a new position and I'll take it!
I no longer need to sit on a pillow in the car or wedge my leg with a pillow to keep it from flopping around during the car ride. Once in a while if the ride is bumpy I'll just hold my leg to keep it from jostling around, since I don't have muscle control in the leg to keep it from just falling out to the side.
I still have to sit in a soft seat though, so no hard table chairs quite yet. I feel like I'm sitting on a tennis ball sized rock. I can do the figure 4 in bed easier than I could last week although it still hurts and makes my muscles tremor. I can sit with my ankle crossed on my knee like a man crosses his legs. I can use the stationary bike with no resistance for about 10 minutes before I'm wiped out or my left butt decides it's had enough. My appetite still isn't up to it's usual standard. I try to have a carnation instant breakfast each day and I take multivitamins and vitamin c along with my one meal I eat a day. I've noticed a lot of my clothes are a lot looser. The swelling around my incision is going down and the more I poke at the incision to see if I can feel the screws, the sorer I notice the area around it becoming. I assume it's because of the swelling receding and the screw heads are making things irritable. I have noticed too that if I rest my arm on the incision I get a very similar deep ache around the screws that was like the deep ache I'd get around the trochanter screws. I really hope I don't have issues with these screws.

I have been using vitamin E oil cream and triple antibiotic ointment on my scar to rub in and try to break up the scar tissue. So far I've not been really diligent with trying to break up the scar tissue because a suture is trying to break through the incision right at the middle of my incision. Once that is settled down, I will get back on trying to break up the scar tissue again.

We've discovered that we can't have our little dog come home til my next follow up when I'm given the green light to wt bear because he was 'visiting' us when my parents brought him over one day to see us and he jumped up right on my PAO leg while I was standing, and although it didn't hurt, it's not safe as I'm not steady enough to ward off a 23 pound jumping jelly bean! I miss him terribly, but I know he's being taken good care of. Our lab is home with us though, as he's proven to show that he'll stay out of my way and is actually kind of scared of my crutches so he won't come near me when I'm on them.

Things I can't live without at this point in time during recovery:
bathroom shower bench
hand held shower head
wheel chair for days I'm alone (husband works 12 hour shifts)
oversized heating pad
water bottle

Things I hate about this recovery:
the horrible callouses I'm getting on the heels of my hands from crutching (my foot cream that worked so well on them last year isn't doing as well of a job this year...)
still my lack of independence
how puny my left thigh is
the fact that I want to do laundry/dishes/vacuum....

I haven't driven anywhere yet because I have been on narcotics for so much longer than I should have been but now that I'm off them, I may take the Jeep out for a spin...when the weather is nice. It's been pretty snowy here in Michigan and I'm not keen on driving just yet in a car I haven't driven in the snow before.

Oh, and it's official, I'm now no longer in my 20's....it's a new decade for me!!!