Dr. Wang popped up on my computer screen early one morning two weeks short of my three-month anniversary for partial knee replacement. I didn't tell him that if I had to do it all over again, I probably would forgo surgery and relocate to Florida, the orthopedic hack Dr. Ranawat recommended almost a decade ago.
Here's why: although the sharp pain in my right-knee has disappeared while climbing up and down the staircase to my apartment, I now have difficulty sitting down on the toilet seat or getting up from a chair without the use of my arms for support. And I do these activities a LOT more, no matter where I live.
"It may have something to do with an exercise I picked up at ApexNetwork Physical Therapy," I speculated to Dr. Wang. "During my first visit, the evaluator told me to get out of a chair as many times as I could in 30 seconds. I did eight which she said was pretty good, so I did 10 as part of my daily home routine until I figured that the moderate but constant pain I was experiencing in my quads might be related."
Dr. Wang suggested tendonitis might be the cause before throwing the physical therapist under the bus.
"Sometimes physical therapists can be too aggressive," he said, shaking his head. "That's why we've completely stopped sending our patients with hip replacements to PT."
He's a little quick to judgment, I thought. I actually had been blaming myself more than the physical therapist who had not instructed me to do the exercise at home. I also had stopped taking meloxicam shortly after returning to New York because I didn't want an NSAID to camouflage my "new normal," whatever that might be.
"Our goal," he emphasized, "is to restore a patient's ability to resume their normal activities."
"In that respect, the surgery has been a success," I admitted. "Despite the quad discomfort, I'm back to about 80% of my biking, walking and swimming. But I'm a lot more exhausted afterward than I used to be and my knee bothers me more when I'm at rest than when I'm active. Will the swelling ever go away?" I didn't mention that the tiny size of my refrigerator freezer had made icing it three times a day impractical.
"That could be the after-effects of surgery," Dr. Wang said. "The swelling can take as long as a year to go away."
In other words, more waiting, with no real sense yet of whether my new normal will be pain-free, or if I ever will get back to 100%. Aging sucks.
