First Post Surgery Assessment
[ Tuesday April 29th 2025 at 2:05 pm ]
My appointment was very interesting and helpful. My surgeon doesn't have all the answers to what is going on with my body. He has enough answers to make reasonable conclusions.
All this fluid coming out of my hip isn't normal. It is how an incision heals when there has been a lot of trauma. I thought my surgeon had cut out the scar tissue from my previous 5 surgeries where the incision was on my left thigh. This wasn't the case. My surgery very aggressively massaged it so no scar tissue remained and the skin reverted to being healthy tissue. This makes a lot more sense why this is happening.
My incision isn't 100% on track with healing. It is around 85%. It is the best that could be expected with this being the 7th time my left hip was operated on. What my surgeon saw makes him think the draining will stop in about a week. I was given supplies to change the dressing each day.
He looked at everything my local hospital did to me on Saturday April 26th. One of the blood tests was for infection. It takes 2 days before the first reading is available. This has now happened. A normal reading for someone who had hip surgery within the past 4 weeks ago is anything under 20. When you are just living your life a good result is 3. A problem exists when the value is above 5. Mine is 0.5. We can confidently know it isn't an infection. When the surgeon talked to me about this it made sense. I understand and agree with this opinion.
What is left is all the scar tissue that was made healthy again being an abnormal part of my surgery. If you think about how long it takes when someone sprains their ankle to recover the same principal applies here. I have soft tissue damage that is healing. It just uses tons of energy to recover. Overall it is reasonable to think my body is simply healing and when I am tired I just need to rest. This is so contrary to how I live my life. I don't want to spend my life in bed. But it is clearly needed for me to heal.
The surgeon acknowledged how physically weak I've been feeling doesn't make sense. I appreciated this. I don't feel alone. What stopped the room from spinning on Monday evening was drinking a high electrolyte drink. I am going to purchase 12 of these and see if it is the boost my body needs. I don't think any harm will come to my body in the short term. Doing this doesn't seem unreasonable.
I will have another appointment with my surgeon in 2 weeks. All in all this was a worth while appointment.