June 24, 2019 - Surgery!

Today was the big day... Surgery day! I had really backed down on my activity over the last month to reduce inflammation of my hip in hopes that it would be easier for my surgeon to get into my hip to fix the problem. Because I backed down on activity, I wasn't having much pain, so then I started worrying the financial and time cost of surgery will end up being unnecessary. But, when I woke up from anesthesia, Mat said the surgeon found multiple things in my hip joint needing to be done including a sharp ridge on my femur head which was dremeled down; a corresponding area on my pelvic bone shredded up from the femur ridge was smoothed out; some old blood in the joint was cleaned out; and the torn labrum was reattached with three anchor stitches.

I was assigned to the first case of the day so my check-in time was 5:45am. I was super happy to be the first case of the day. I was brought back to the pre-op room around 6:15am They rolled me into the operating room around 7:30am but I had fallen asleep from whatever medicine they gave me prior to being rolled out of the pre-op room. The surgery took two hours total. The team was fantastic! The nurse anesthetist was great. Since I've never had anesthesia before, I told her that my mother had to stay in PACU all day for intractable nausea and vomiting for both surgeries she had. So the nurse anesthetist placed a scopolamine patch behind my ear and gave me two extra strength Tylenol and some gabapentin to reduce the amount of narcotics needed during surgery. Man, that worked wonders! Next thing I knew I woke up in the PACU with my hip brace in place, no nausea, able to eat a jello cup immediately, then up to the toilet. Then they brought Mat back. With those activities done, they set me up for discharge, put me in a wheelchair, then sent us to the pharmacy to pick up prescribed medications before helping me to the car. It's about an hour drive home so I was worried about maybe getting carsick from the anesthesia but luckily it never happened. I continued to snack on light foods all day long and move back and forth to the bathroom with my crutches.

They reiterated that I should use the pain pills prescribed on a schedule for the first few days to make sure the pain doesn't get out of control, plus a docusate to prevent constipation and/or bowel obstruction while taking the pain meds, and 325mg aspirin twice a day to prevent blood clots from forming while I rested and as an NSAID to reduce swelling. So I was diligent in taking them at scheduled intervals. The Valium prescribed as a muscle relaxant seemed to make my leg feel better than the one 5/325 Percocet tablet I took every four hours but my pain never reached higher than a five out of ten. I'm glad I got the surgery done and now can truly focus on working my way back to walking pain-free again!

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