Day 1

It is about 24 hours since I got out of surgery, and I am feeling pretty good! I have amazingly low levels of pain compared to when I had the PAO on my left. To give you an idea, for my left PAO I pressed my PCA for morphine around 400 times with about 150 successful doses in the first days after surgery (the others weren’t successful because a time lock out system only allows 1 dose every 5 minutes). On top of that, I was taking endone, panadol, tramadol and had 2 patches of some sort of pain killer, and was still in agony. As of right now, I have pressed my PCA 23 times for 20 successful doses, only have one patch and am taking panadol.

It has been a completely different experience. I can sit up, I can move my leg around a little bit and can generally function pretty well! It is completely incomparable! Until I actually spoke to my surgeon I was wondering if he had actually done the procedure at all! But he has done it, and all went well. This time I had two units of blood as well as 600ml of my own recycled blood. I don’t remember being in recovery or moving to my room, I just remember waking up slowly in my room and the rest of last night is a blur. I have compression stockings on, as well as a sort of leg sleeve that inflates and deflates over and over to keep the blood flowing in my legs. I think these have helped a lot because my feet and heels don’t feel sore at all. Right now I feel about as good as I did on day 4 or 5 last time!

In my PCA I have ketamine instead of morphine that I had last time. I think it definitely helps with pain, but it messes with my head a fair bit. Almost immediately after pressing the PCA I start to see double, and feel slow and uncoordinated. It also makes me so tired I almost can’t stay awake. I guess it will be good for when I want to go to sleep tonight! I have different dressings this time as well – I have the honeycomb type padding over both wounds, like I did for the scope. It’s good because I can see where the scar is going to be…and I think I will be pretty much symmetrical!

So right now I am pretty happy knowing that all of my major surgery has been finished, and all that is ahead is a lot of recovery and rehab. I’m relieved that it all went well, and that it’s now up to me to get my legs back to being as strong as possible.