Trego's Mountain Ear

I’ve completed my third week with the new knee.  I haven’t been making the progress I wanted, so I got on line, and pulled up the recovery timeline.  The first one I called up was for people over 65 – and all of a sudden, I started feeling much better.  It’s nice to be 75 and find out that I’m healing up quicker than the over 65 chart shows.  So I’ll quit sniveling – but I still want the full recovery to come a little quicker.

The timeline says I’m having trouble with driving.  There is the advantage of an automatic transmission in a couple of the cars – but my tractors still use a clutch.  So once I wriggle into the car, I’m fine.  On the other hand, the tractor seat isn’t in the right spot yet.  It took a couple days getting around with a borrowed walker, but at the end of week 3, I’m getting by with just a cane.  To be fair, I have a lot more experience with a cane than a walker.  

According to the recovery timeline, my only problem seems to be impatience.  That said, the orthopedic folks told me what to expect – I just didn’t think it really applied to me.  The biggest shock was reading the anesthesiology nurse’s report the day before surgery – it included a 3.7% chance of death.  It took a while to understand how that could be – everyone who told me about how good knee replacement surgery was survived it.  In contrast, the folks who died as part of knee replacement surgery have been remarkably tight lipped about their experience.