Hydro Wednesday

How can you not be happy on a beautiful day like today?  I'm not sure what happened this morning but I woke up and I just felt great.  Maybe even a little hyperactive.  All a little strange really.  I reinforced the hyper with a little caffeine and I think that the proper adjective for me this afternoon is 'bouncy'.  Not that I'm jumping around the office this afternoon (still a little while before the femurs will like that), but I was jumping around the pool this morning.  I had a good session today and spent an extra half hour in the pool literally jumping around.  I'm wondering if the muscles will ache a little tomorrow.  It will be a good ache, so I'll accept it gratefully! (Well there may be minor whinging if it's really bad but in a positive and amazed way!)

It's starting to feel like the more I do, the more I can do.  I've never felt like that before.  It was always the more I do, the more I have to figure out what I can not do to balance it out.  I'm sure that at some point there will be a wall that I will fly into head first and I find what my new limits are.  They are moving so quickly at the moment, I'm not really keeping up with them which is why it seems like I can keep going forever at the moment.

I'm at work at the moment, having a little afternoon break while my printer goes to work.  It's been a good day here too.  I'm slowly starting to take on more work and getting on top of the handover from the previous person looking after a lot of it.  It has been a big week so far and I'm just half way through.  I'm likely to have a few more big days this week and I'm actually ready for them.

Friday Pilates

We took a few pictures at Pilates on Friday to submit to Body Leadership for the article that was being published for Body Leader of the Month.   I'm not sure if the one on the left is leg circles or adductor stretching.

In the next, each leg take turns in pushing forward while the other lifts.

I've talked about the next exercise in a pre-op post about Pilates. (Long Spine) I just started this one again on Friday.  Controlling the movement fluidly is a little more difficult that pre-op but still feels really great.   It is working that troublesome glute really well!  There is another one were I am lying on a box on my stomach facing the left (towards the picture of the skeleton on the wall that you can see in the first picture) but I haven't included that one - it truly is the definition of a bad picture!  The increase in the amount of exercises that I can do changes dramatically from week to week and things that I didn't like and weren't comfortable with pre-op aren't all that bad anymore.

In particular if you remember my intense dislike to the reverse knee pulls, well, that's changed.  It isn't that much of an issue any more.  I thought it was because I didn't feel comfortable looking down at the ground thinking that I would fall flat on my face.  I guess it must have been just general discomfort that I wasn't interpreting correctly.

I'm also back on the foam roller and balancing quite well.  I tried this exercise with both arms up off the ground at the same time but I'm not quite stable enough for that yet and get a little wobbly.  Maybe by next week I will have the strength back that I require!

I'm back on the bosu as well.  I can stand and do squats and also from standing transfer weight from side to side.  I stood pretty close to the wall when I got onto the bosu since though I really wanted to try it out and see if I was ready yet, I didn't want to fall on my ass either!

Friday was a very productive session.  I am starting to see how much more I will be able to progress past what I was able to do pre-op.   There are a few exercises that I was doing about six years ago that I am yet to try again but I think that I will be quickly moving on to more that I wasn't able to do at all.   One of the main that I was able to do back then requires me to stand on the reformer (one leg on the bit that I'm laying on in the top pictures and one on the other where the wooden panel and the feet support it - the bar bit goes down).  I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of getting up there just yet but I'm sure after a few more times on the bosu, I'll gain enough confidence to get up there and give it a go.  I don't think that the exercise itself will be difficult for me in the slightest, it's just being that far off the ground that I'm not quite 'good' with yet.  I'll keep you all posted!

Elliptical update

After spending twenty minutes on the elliptical yesterday, I woke up this morning with sore muscles.  Without any excruciating hip pain that I would have associated with about twenty minutes of any kind of activity pre-op.  It is pretty amazing.  If I managed to survive for 20 minutes doing that type of activity, I would have needed extra meds before bed, would have suffered with little sleep and probably would have still been limping and in pain today.

I stepped up pretty quickly from the 15 minutes that I did on Monday.  I was probably feeling a little bit over confident after smashing the 90 degree mark and it's gone ok.  I'm a little tired today and won't finish up with that many minutes today but tomorrow I plan to do 20 again.  I figure if I stick to that for a couple of days and get my body used to that activity, I should be able to add another 4 or 5 minutes pretty soon.

End of Financial Year Craziness

And so it starts.  It is my busy time of year and the craziness has begun.  The next two weeks will really be a test of how rehabilitated I really am.  The extra days of work that I picked up about two weeks ago were to start the setup of a new digital setup for cut over at the start of the new financial year. The work that I started a month or so ago has all of the end of year things to do like payment summaries and the like.  Between the two of them, I'm busier than I have been in a very long time.  I'm trying to keep work on just the three days a week so I have four days to make sure that everything else gets done.  I haven't done so well yet as little things are creeping into other days as I'm capping out at about five - six hours of work in a day and some days I really need a little bit more than that.  Mostly this is because of the amount of data entry that I need to get done at the moment to set up this new system.  I don't think that my brain was working properly when I estimated how long the task would actually take.  My brain is getting back into gear as I get back into things.  It's almost there (the setup and my brain!) and I will be going back in tomorrow to keep working on it.  Tomorrow is expected to be a big day so today was a work day reprieve so that I could get a few other things done.

Today's big activity was grocery shopping, which I managed on my own.  I also got all of the groceries into the house by myself, put them away and then organised dinner.  It wasn't a full shop as it is an in between week, so I've started off a little easier on myself.  The last time I went grocery shopping, I went with my husband and he brought everything in so even though it has been less, I still did it by myself.

I'm still at six minutes on the elliptical today.  I was supposed to go up to seven but by the time I had the groceries away and had cooked dinner, I hit the wall and the second session only went to two and a half.  It doesn't sound like much but it is for me at the moment.  My cardio fitness is pretty disgraceful at the moment and will take a little while to recoup.  I haven't been able to do any real cardio activity for quite some time so I'm not overly surprised at the level that I'm starting from.  On the plus side, even though the muscles are fatiguing quite quickly, they are holding up to a lot faster movement than I expected at this early stage.  I'm not quite sure how the speed equates to walking due to the differences in the stride length but for me I think that averaging between 3 - 5 km/hr is definitely a great start.  If I can maintain this speed and improve my stamina, I think I would increase the resistance and incline as part of the program before trying to speed it up anymore.

I'm not quite sure what my walking speed is like at the moment and can't really think of a great way to measure it.  I had thought about using a pedometer when I go out to get a rough idea but it didn't really work out.   I tried using it around the house to count steps but it looks like I still have too much sway as it is counting too many steps.  I had wanted to record the number of steps each day to see the increase in my activity but it looks like it will have to wait for a little while longer.

Arrival of our Elliptical

This morning our elliptical machine arrived and I have already added it into my rehab program.  I need to start off pretty slow and five minutes a day seems to be enough to begin with today since I was in at work as well.  I've started off at the bottom two levels of resistance without any incline.  To start with, the aim is to use it to increase the walking type of activity that I am doing each day.  Though exaggerated, the elliptical is a more natural walking movement pattern than how I am walking at the moment.  It also seems to help loosen the muscles up to help get through the longer days.  I'm hoping that this is not just a result of the movement but a reflection of how the effects of exercise like this will now affect my overall health and wellbeing.  Pre-op, something like this would have me in pain that lasted for much longer than the amount of time that I had spent on it.  The difference between the grating that my hip joints used to do compared with how fluidly they move now. I still can't help be amazed.  I hope that I don't forget this feeling.

I'm hoping that within a few weeks, I have built to a half hour walk and my gait pattern and strength have improved enough to be using my cane all of the time (well at least for a couple weeks after that and then maybe not at all).

Overdoing It

Last night I needed to use two crutches.  I felt like my right glute was a knot of muscles and it hurt more than I've felt pain in a very long time.  It really hurt when I put more than about 40% weight on it and when there was no weight on it, it just was a regular type of pain.  That's the strong side that I don't normally use a crutch to assist, so I ended up back with two for a while yesterday.

How did I get to this point?
Well, probably a little bit of stupid mixed in with a little bit of stubborn.  After so many years of 'managing', I really thought that I understood my body enough to have a handle on finding where the limits fall on a day to day basis.  I thought that I had learnt the lesson to listen to my body a long time ago.  I was pretty good at working out how many spoons I had each day and figuring out early if I've dropped any throughout the day (Check out the The Spoon Theory if you don't know what I'm talking about!).   With change happening every day, it is difficult for me to work it out with any accuracy at all and because I want to keep pushing forward, we have the ingredients for a 'stop work'.

Today has been a very slow day.  Muscles ache and I'm limping pretty badly.  I have done my stretches today and some of my exercises but now where near the level of activity that I have been doing over the last few weeks.  Slowing down is not really that great for my mood.  I'm going to have days like this where it feels like I'm going backwards when I am still moving forwards and just need a break.  The last few days have been the busiest that I have had since the op and I did ok.

The burst of activity started on Wednesday when I went back to the office for most of the day.  I ended up being in there for about five hours which normally wouldn't seem like a lot.  It's not that I didn't notice before how much activity this new office requires because I did. How far things actually are, how many steps I need to walk up and down, the distance to the bathroom, driving home in traffic and where the car was parked were all part of the considerations to go back.  I was ready and it was a full day.  I didn't really think about how sitting for that long would affect me and I was really tired by the time I was finished for the day.  By the time I got home I was totally exhausted but not sore.

I slept well and started early the next morning.  Life is getting back to normal and I had to do normal things like taking my car in for service.  I could have done with another few hours sleep to recover from the previous day and my muscles were still tired and a little tight from the previous day.  I felt pretty good though and we headed out after dropping the car off.  We ended up walking around a shopping centre and looking at elliptical machines.  The first place that we looked at was a no go.  The girl that was a manager couldn't seem to comprehend that I was looking at the elliptical for rehabilitation purposes not for burning calories.  I'm not quite sure whether there was a subtle underlying dig there or not as she kept going back to increasing the heart rate and a proper work out.  It seemed like she might have been in love with her own voice to, though that impression really could have come from my irritation at being told that I needed to burn some calories more than I need to build up my muscles and get my hips moving.  I'm still on crutches and I made it quite clear what my rehab requirements were and it didn't sink in.  It is possible that she was just a bimbo and meant nothing by it.

We went to another fitness store and tried out quite a few of them out.  The guy there was able to listen to our requirements and help out without being insulting.  He was actually pretty cool and helpful.  I probably spent 4 or 5 minutes on different machines which helped loosen everything up.  I wasn't using any resistance at all and that was enough to start out.  We made the decision to get one and it gets delivered on Monday. The rest of the day included finishing off some more of the work that I'd started the previous day, baking and some more chores around the house.  I was on my feel for most of the day and was really ready for sleep by the end of the day.

Friday started with a hydro session.  It went for about an hour and a half which is the longest that we have had so far.  I felt pretty good when I got out of the pool but by the time that I got home, I was pretty well wrecked.   Hydro can kind of sneak up on you like that.  It doesn't feel like you've done that much until later.  Sometimes it doesn't even hit until the next day.  I thought that I felt somewhat rejuvenated later in the afternoon so I figured that I would start on the to do list again and headed back to the shopping centre to go to medicare and MBF to sort out refunds for the surgery.  This involved a fair amount of walking and where at some point I hit the limit and ran out of spoons.

I'm not sure if it was a cumulative effect of the activity of a few days in a row or just that one day with the extended hydro session.  It could also have been one of those unexplained losses of energy linked in with something completely unrelated to the amount of physical activity that I have been doing.  My body may have just decided that it wants a break, just because.

Regardless of what the reason is for my enforced break, it's where I'm at today.  Using two crutches and going as slow as I was a few weeks ago.  I'm better than I was when I went to sleep last night but the muscles still aren't happy.  My husband was some what amused by my request to massage my ass to try and get the knot out.  Amused but he still assisted.  I would have just about asked almost anyone to massage my ass last night.  There is no dignity when it comes to pain.

GP Checkup, Bad Seats and Regular Days

The last few days have seemed busy even though I really haven't achieved a whole lot.  I couldn't even tell you when the last time was that I wrote a blog update without checking.  Hey, it was that entry Pain management: in the beginning - that still needs to be finished!  There is so much more to add and it seems like most days I'm just too busy to sit for a few hours and get the details down.  It's a little odd considering that I haven't really been anywhere for ages.  The every day bits and pieces haven't really been covered for a little while either and there are a couple of things that have happened that rate a mention.

Physio on Friday was good.  It wasn't much of an exercise day as we focused on releasing some of the very tight muscles that had been driving me crazy.  Even though I had been trying to release them myself, I hadn't quite gotten to where I needed to be and needed some extra help to get there.  I felt a hundred times better by the end of the session.

When we did the range measurements for hip flexion, it was actually my knees holding me back in the active range.  Once we released these, I ended up with an extra 5 degrees more than the previous measurement.  (If you need a visual on this one to understand what on earth I am talking about:  Laying on your back, slide your heel up towards your bottom making sure that your pelvis stays straight - so other leg straight and level on the bed.  The active hip range is measured in this position.  The passive range is measured by having your leg lifted to table top and moved towards your chest.  For me, there is a few degrees difference between the two)

So while all this was going on, the landline rang in the lounge room which is a fair way from the bed where I was getting measured.  I elected to ignore the phone as the only people that have it are the hospital, the red cross and the alarm company and I could see no reason why any one of those would be calling me since I've been to my post op appointment, spoken to the red cross in the last week and I was in the house so the alarm can't have been going off.  After it stopped ringing, my mobile rang.  It was the alarm company.  They were just checking to make sure that the alarm was still working since it hadn't been armed in such a long time (maybe two weeks).  We had to go outside the house and arm and disarm while I was on the phone so that they could confirm that it was all working properly.  How very embarrassing.  A reminder that I hadn't gone anywhere in two weeks.  Hopefully I'll be driving myself soon and will be a little bit more independent.  Even though I am quite comfortable at home and can fill the days, I think that getting out a bit more would probably do me some good.

I didn't really do anything out of the ordinary on Saturday.  It was a day for sleeping in, getting my exercises done, making sure that I did a few extra trips up and down the stairs and I watched some tv.  My husband was at home but unfortunately he had to work most of the day so I was pretty much left to my own devices.  

Sunday we went out to lunch at my mums place.  It's the longest car trip I've had since pre-op and it went ok.  The seat that I sat on for lunch wasn't really that great though and I came home a little bit tired and tight.  This probably wasn't just a bad seat for me but more that since I went out and it wasn't an activity where I had to walk very far that I didn't have the same level of activity on that day.  I am used to doing a far bit now, even if it is just around the house and a day where the activity levels drop seems to make more of a difference than I thought.  I still only needed a couple of Panadol Osteo to sleep, so I guess it wasn't too bad.  I'll have to make up for the lack of walking today.  

Today I had a GP checkup.  Primarily it was to sign some paperwork so that I can get some extra physio rebates from Medicare as I have a chronic condition (I'm sure you've figured this out by now!). While I was there I checked on my blood work (all good, inflammatory markers a little high but nothing that wasn't expected), got a flu vaccination and went through the changes / improvements since my last visit.  The doctor seemed really happy with my progress.  He has seen some bilaterals before so I guess he has some basis for comparison.  The main changes to report were the lack of medication required, using one crutch most of the time, hip restrictions gone and improvements in ranges.  

Things feel like they are going so very slowly at the moment.  It feels like the improvements are slowing down.  It's hard for me to see the differences between each day as it is taking more than a day for the differences to add up to something substantial.  The last big one was being able to balance on my right leg.  I'm not sure that there has been anything new since then.  

I suppose I could say that sitting on a regular toilet seat and managing to get back off it was an achievement.  I'm not sure if I could have done that a few weeks ago (I wasn't allowed to try until I got off hip restrictions anyway).   I thought I would give it a go on one of my trips downstairs to practice stairs.  Since it has been two months since I sat on a regular low toilet, I really had forgotten just how low they were.  I'm not sure who came up with that idea but it truly is crazy.  The height I have now (with the over toilet height adjustable seat) seems far more reasonable.  I guess I will have to practice and get used to it the more I am gong out in public though.  I wonder if getting on an off the toilet could be classed as adding an exercise to my day?  I suppose it could be if I drank a lot of water, right?  Anyway, it was just as well I had practiced before we went out on Sunday as I was prepared to use a regular height toilet and it all went fine.  Sometimes I really do wonder how it is that everything seems to end up a conversation about toilets these days.  

I fit into my regular size jeans again.  This means that the swelling has gone down and my thighs have returned to their normal size which is positive.  The knees are still swollen and really should be iced but it's too cold! I know I'm a wimp.  Strange really that I get through a massive surgery like this and what I want to complain about is that it is too cold to ice my knees!  Some would also say that it really isn't cold in Brisbane but it is to me as I've lived here for many years and am well adjusted to this climate.  I really should do it in the mornings when I'm sitting out the front in the sunlight drinking my coffee.  It probably wouldn't be too bad then.  Maybe I'll try that one out tomorrow and let you know.

The big exercise for today will be grocery shopping this evening.  We need fresh food.  There is half a lettuce and two carrots left in the fridge and I really feel like a big salad for dinner.  Even though we really only need to go to the fruit and vegetable section, I think I'll need to go down as many of the aisles as I can because I need to know if I can get any further than I did last time.  I think that I'll still take the wheelie walker in case I need a seat.  There are some seats in the centre of the complex, outside of the supermarket, so maybe I could take my crutches.  The crutches are definitely more comfortable to walk with but I'm not sure on this one.  I might have a chat to my husband and see what he thinks.  As in, if we take both and I use my crutches and I think I need the wheelie walker will you go downstairs and get it?  or can we take both and you push the wheelie walker until I need it? Not sure how this will go down.  It's worth a shot though, right?  If I'm not completely wrecked by the time we get home, I'll update this post.

Unscheduled Daily Activities

Some days I wake up and everything feels good.  It feels like I could get out of bed and things will just work like they are supposed to.  It certainly feels like it.  There is no pain anymore.  It isn't until I start to get myself out of bed and the sleepy haze wears off and I realise that things aren't quite there yet.  There are still a lot of exercises to get through and a lot of strength to still build.  I started of the day in quite a positive mood.  Last night while doing a few extra exercises, I found I was able to balance on my right leg without any support meaning that strength is returning to my hip stabilisors.  These are an important part of actually being able to walk without the crutches.  The left is still far to shaky to take the support away yet but hey, one out of two aint bad.

Daily activities are a huge part of building strength.  Incorporating activity into the day, even to add an extra trip up and down the stairs all makes a difference.  A piece of advice that I was given before I had the op was to do just one more than was on the list of prescribed exercises (without overdoing it - so I have to listen to my body pretty carefully so that I am pushing myself without hurting something that would stop me from doing my exercises the next day).   Using that theory, I have been trying to add more into each day.  Sometimes circumstances make this happen without me actually having to try.  Life often throws unscheduled curve balls just to keep things interesting.

Today, it was attempting to wash the car.  For those that know me, this really will seem like a very strange thing for me to get up and do.  I had a pretty good reason for it and the process was somewhat of an effort that I really hadn't considered being the 'activity' to add to today.  There was bird poo (or possible bat poo - it was brown and stuck like glue) on almost every single panel on my beautiful black car.  There was splatter absolutely everywhere.  I'm really not sure how it was entirely possible for this to happen without a flock of awful little animals deciding to specifically seek out and target my car.  I noticed the big splotches when I went out the front to sit in the sunlight to drink my coffee this morning.  A couple of weeks ago, I probably would have resigned to the fact that it would have to stay on there until someone else was around to take care of it as it slowly ate into the paintwork.  Today, I thought that I had the energy to give it a go.

I went downstairs and started to soak the large splotches with the car cleaner, I notice more on every single panel.  I probably spent about an hour shuffling around the car cleaning it as best as I could while my crutches were leant up against the bin beside the car.  I needed both hands, one for the car cleaning spray and one for the cleaning cloth.  I did ok as I moved around the car, though they aren't really real step yet, still more of a cross between a shuffle and a waddle.  After I had completely trashed three cleaning cloths, I called it a day and had another shower to clean the smell off me.  I don't think the smell really was on me but my brain seemed to think that it was and I needed to be clean again.  The cloths also needed to be cleaned and that required two trips up and down the inside stairs.  The stairs are slowly becoming a little easier.  The inside ones are narrower than outside but they seem to be not quite as high, so stepping up without vaulting isn't quite as difficult (still not easy, just not as difficult).  Overall this little unscheduled activity added a fair amount of incidental exercise today.

I am pretty worn out tonight which is a good sign that I have expended sufficient energy today.  Another day has passed on my trip to recovery and hopefully tomorrow morning I will wake again feeling good and it will be just that little bit easier to get out of bed.  I hope that my unscheduled activities that unexpectedly get added to my day tomorrow aren't quite as smelly as they were today.

One Month Post Op: Home for two days

Wow, what a relief to actually be here.  I'm tired and it's still difficult to do day to day activities but I am finding ways to do what I need to do.  I'm finding that these activities are achievable and slowly getting easier for me.


This morning I sorted out my cereal for breakfast, a cup of water and the pills that I would need to eat after and sat down in the sitting room to eat it - all on my own.  It may seem like such a little thing to some but there is an effort and thought required to put all the pieces of the process together.  The first thing that needs to be done is to find somewhere near the wheelie walker to put the crutches where I can reach both and they won't fall over.  The reason I need the wheelie walker is that when you are using two crutches you can't use your hands to carry anything which is required if you don't want to eat at the kitchen bench.  Then it's a case of getting everything you need:  a bowl, a cup, the cereal, the milk, the pills. You need to be able to sort out obstacles, like moving the stool that you left in front of the pantry door last night so that you can actually get the cereal out.  Set it all up and then put the cereal and milk away again.  Then it's get the wheelie walker carefully over the little tiled lip between the kitchen and the sitting room without spilling anything.  Getting into the chair getting close enough with the walker so you can still reach everything once you have sit down and then doing the reverse and getting things all away again.   


Real food is such a wonderful thing.  Even if it is just my choice of cereal.  It has been so much more than that since I've been home though!  My husband cooked my favourite risotto the day I came home (chorizo, mushroom and baby spinach).  I got to be a helper and instructor.  I think that my husband will soon weary of the instructor component and will be more comfortable with me navigating the kitchen and preparing meals again.  I've also had real salads, grainy bread and cereals and even toasted hot cross buns (they were frozen for my return home since I missed out on easter - and frankly missed out on hot toasted bakery/bread items in hospital).  There are real green beans in the fridge (not icky overcooked frozen ones) and other fresh vegetables that I'm looking forward to in the next couple of days.  My tummy is so much happier.  I am so in love with real food!  (I am a little curious as to whether I came home with any vitamin deficiencies.  I didn't get any final bloods taken and I'm not that curious I want to brave a trip to the doctors just yet, so I will just have to wonder)


Day to day at home is more exercise than in the hospital.  Activities like breakfast take time and energy to co-ordinate and our house is larger than the hospital room and immediate area that I used regularly while I was in hospital.  Even going to the bathroom is more exercise as it's a far longer walk from anywhere I am likely to be inside the house.  I've also tried to add the exercises that I have to do into my day to day activities so that I am getting more in.  This means that when I'm on my way back from the bathroom, I might do leg lifts at the basin (it's on a solid base and fixed - I'm not going anywhere hanging onto that) or maybe squats.  The trip back to where ever I was in the house has to be the long way - past each end of the house, even if I don't need anything from there.  I figure that the more that I add in, the more activity I'll have and the quicker recovery will be.  I'm ready to be fixed already.  I really have had enough of being so reliant on others, though realistically I know I have a little while to go before I'm going to be completely independent.  


I am going to have my PT come in twice a week to start off with and we will see how I go in adding to my program as I progress further.  I'm hoping to be confident enough to go to the hydro pool in a couple of weeks as well.  I've been cleared by the rehab doctor for this but I'm not quite ready for public yet as the walk to the pool from the entrance is reasonably long compared with the distances that I have been walking in one go at the moment.  I have a fear of being pushed over and there are always millions of kids at this pool that you need to pass to get to the ramp to get in - I'm sure that as I get stronger this will pass and in the meantime I'll find creative ways to maximise the exercise.  My PT is gong to check out some other pools in the area to see if any of the others have a set up which will be a little easier/safer for me until I have a bit more confidence.


It's almost time to start to figure out dinner again.  One thing hospital has done to me is make me hungry for dinner much earlier than normal.  Not sure what it will be for dinner yet but I can assure you it will be awesome!

14 Days Post Op: Good Friday

Public Holidays mean that the rehab gym is closed.  I still have exercises to do, though it is a little more difficult without some of the equipment.  I have four days of this to work through and hope that the schedule that I am on sees at least some improvements.  Up until now I have seen a change every day and I hope to continue to see these things happen.  I'm a little worried that it won't run as smoothly and as quickly while the physios are away.

The big improvement today was being able to shower and dress independently.  Thankfully I have had my husband to assist me with this, so it hasn't been as much of a big deal as it could have been. (I'm not particularly happy with the idea of someone other than my husband help me with this.   Hopefully by being able to do this myself now, I can be a little more independent and put less pressure on him to be here first thing in the morning to assist with the getting ready process.

Between being out of bed at 7:30am and getting ready and sitting out of bed until my husband arrived around eleven, I was pretty much wiped out for a while.  It sounds strange but sitting out of bed requires significantly more energy than sitting up in bed.  I'm not quite sure why.  I had a bit of a sit back in bed and took advantage of my husband being available to give my feet and calves a bit of a massage with some moisturising cream.  It is ridiculously dry inside here and my skin is peeling.  It's truly disgusting.  It might also be some of the cleansers and tapes that have been used over the past couple of weeks that have assisted in this process as I do have quite sensitive skin.  I probably should have started this moisturising process a lot earlier to prevent this, however, it wasn't something that I'd really thought about happening.  I don't think that the compression socks are helping much with the skin they cover either.

After lunch, I actually went outside for the first time in a week.  It was a bit strange to be out in the open.  We didn't go too far, just out of the front door of the building.  I went in a wheelchair as I'm not quite up to that walk yet especially since there isn't any seats downstairs that are the right height for me to sit on while I've still got hip precautions.  I'm not sure how people do this when they are out of hospital but haven't yet had the precautions lifted.  I don't know too many places that actually accommodate for the higher chairs and toilet seats that are required.  I guess by the time I get home, I'll still want to be in going through my own physio program, working on the strength and ability to hopefully ditch the crutches at six weeks so there won't be a great deal of time to be looking at spending too much time out and about.

After getting back to my room from downstairs, I got stuck into the first set of exercises for the day.  This pretty much tired me out again and put me back into bed for a bit of a rest a chance to catchup with a friend that came to visit and to post for today.  I am still planning to do another set today to hopefully replicate the level of activity that I have been doing in the gym for the past few days.  This might wait until I've had a short siesta though :)

Surgeon Advice for Surgery Prep

I found this linked off a discussion board where a number of contributors have great things to say about Dr Gross.    He looks to have done quite a lot of these, having started with the resurfacing procedure in 1989 which seems to be well before it became reasonably commonplace.  [Side note: The first I heard about resurfacing was in 2002 from a rheumatologist who I saw very briefly (as I really didn't like the guy), though he didn't really understand the procedure and its benefits enough to answer any questions or be humble enough to recommend that I speak to a surgeon if I really want my questions answered.  At that time I was pretty much running away from surgery anyway as I'd just started down a new physio path that was making such a huge difference.  (Anyway - based on the conversations with my surgeon, there is no chance I would have been a resurfacing candidate then anyway due to my bone quality)]

Anyway, back to Dr Gross, he actually has some prep advice that was missing from the material that I have brought home about my procedure.  Check it out here: http://www.grossortho.com/hipinfo10.htm
Some of it is pretty common sense and ties in nicely with the program that I have made up myself with the help of the professionals that I have been working with for a while now.

The recovery worksheets are interesting as well.  Though different surgeons recommend slightly different paths, the information is comprehensive and certainly interesting reading.  The exercises that are in the phase two are of more interest to me.  I understand that you need to start out slow and not overdo it and have to follow the instructions given to you by the surgeon.  The fact that you could end up in phase two at six weeks is pretty amazing.  The slower path might drive me crazy and I hope that I am in a rapid path plan.  I guess it will be a wait and see type of thing.