As promised, the Knee Replacement Blog

I really want to be a blogger. But there's a gap between my wanting to write and my actually doing it. . . Anyway, I did post a knee replacement blog on another site, and I'm bringing it over here, just in case there's anybody reading this who's considering knee replacement surgery. Mine was over 2 months ago now, and it's coming along, sort of. I still have nerve twinges. When I saw my surgeon last week, he put me back on Percocet, which gave me a wonderful long weekend without pain. But I can't take Percocet and work at the same time. It makes me stupid, in its literal sense - puts me in a kind of stupor. I still can't do stairs, and I walk with a cane for balance. I loathe that cane. It makes me feel old. It usually scores me a seat on the subway, though.

So, with no further ado, the first installment of the Knee Replacement Blog!

June 27, 2008

Last Monday, June 23, I had my left knee replaced. Everything went well. I spent three days in the hospital, as expected. The hospital staff was wonderful. Everybody was pleasant and helpful. Tuesday they had me sit up in a chair (which consisted of standing up, grabbing the walker, shuffling a couple of steps to the right, and sitting down again). Wednesday they had me walk (with the walker) across the hall - which gave me bathroom privileges, so goodbye, Mister Bedpan! Thursday I walked (with the walker, as usual) down to the next room. They told me I was doing wonderfully. I felt great. This was going to be a breeze.

Then I moved to the rehab hospital.

Now, my recovery is still going well and I'm walking fairly long distances with the walker, so that's not the problem. Here's what I wrote the day after I moved here:

6/27

I really need to write this down – nobody would believe it anyway. This lovely little rehab hospital (or so I thought) with Wifi in every room and large-screen TVs, remodeled two years ago... well. It's a prison camp. My room is opposite the nurses' station, and the nurse notification signal is a loud screech, kind of like a smoke alarm. The annoying chimes and beeps at the hospital suddenly don't seem so bad.

First of all, the ambulance sent to pick me up was an hour late, and the attendants didn't know how to get to the rehab hospital. One of them ceaselessly harassed the other one about being girly and feminine (he wasn't). They missed the driveway the first time, but turned around and got in all right on the next pass. When I got wheeled in the door, [my older son] was waiting for me. He'd been waiting two hours, from my original arrival time, which had already been delayed an hour...

My heart sank even further when they put me in the room across from the nurses' station. I knew it would be noisy, and I have enough trouble sleeping in strange places as it is... It just so happened that my roommate's granddaughters were visiting her at the time, and I was disappointed – I had hoped I could be by myself. My roommate has turned out to be great, so it turned out not to be a bad thing at all. The rooms were small, the beds were tiny and, as it turned out, dreadfully uncomfortable. I was hot and sticky and sweating like the proverbial pig, and all I wanted was a shower.

Somehow I managed to convinced them to let me have a shower. This involved having a nurse's aide wheel me up to the shower room. Here she turned me over to the shower attendant (who was another nurse's aide). She transferred me over to a “bathing chair”, which looked like a commode without a tank. I'm going to get showered on a toilet seat? Oh, this should be an experience! Well, of course I had to strip naked, which wasn't all that hard, since all I was wearing was two hospital johnnys (one on back to front so my butt wouldn't hang out) and a pair of pressure stockings. Well, after three days in the hospital I didn't have any modesty left anyway, so I ripped 'em off. (They helped me with the stockings, which are thigh-high, have open toes, are white, and help keep my legs from swelling.) I had my blue T-shirt nightgown to put on afterwards.

So I was pushed into the shower stall in this large commode-without-a-tank, and the attendant proceded to scrub me off. I was uncomfortable about it because she was a black woman and it made me think of slavery, which I'd never want to practice. Anyway, she was rough and dictatorial, and she was hard to understand. But I got my hair washed and my body to the waist. Then she spread a towel in front of me and allowed me to stand up long enough to soap my belly and crotch. Then she hosed me down. I felt like an elephant being washed. She made me sit down immediately. Then she wheeled me back out to the outer stall, and we dried me off. I was allowed to stand to get my butt and crotch toweled off. I put on the nightgown. Another nurses' aide came in, and she was drafted into helping get me into the wheelchair. That second aide pushed me back to my room. She let me keep a towel to finish drying off my hair. I didn't realize how precious a piece of bathroom linen would become.

I was returned to my uncomfortable bed. I felt much better for being clean at last.

Then the struggles really began.

The kitchen consultant came in and made notes of our food preferences, so that they could ignore them, as it turned out. I made myself sputteringly clear to her that I wanted the diabetic menu. I was frustrated by the fact that the hospital never figured this out.

My nurse for the evening (who had originally escorted me to the showers), had rinsed out my pressure stockings and hung them in my bathroom. Within a few hours, my left knee had ballooned alarmingly. So I rang the nurse and asked for an ice pack. You'd have thought I asked for yak butter or something equally unlikely to be found around a hospital. She gave me a tiny one, maybe 4 “ x 4 “. It melted almost immediately. I managed to get her attention again, and she gave me a standard-sized cold pack , maybe 12 x 6. She thought maybe I needed one of those Physical Therapy ice packs that can be secured around the leg. I asked if they had any. They didn't up here, but she could ask at PT when they were in tomorrow...

Wait a minute. Isn't this a REHAB hospital? Am I the first patient they've ever had who had post-surgical swelling? I doubt it. This is just another example of how woefully unprepared they've been.

Not only that, but this turns out to be a place where there's one nurse for 20 patients. Stupid. And every single one of the nurse's aides I've met so far has been a bitch. They stick their noses in the air and act as if you've insulted them if you ask them to do their job.

Example: I asked the attendant who wheeled me back after my shower if I could have a box of tissues. She said she'd look for them. I'm sure she didn't. I asked the next person I saw for a box of tissues. She said we'd have to wait until the next day; nobody knew where anything was during the night. So I asked a third person for them. She said she'd check, and disappeared. I suspect she went back to the station to talk huffily with the other nurses about the patient who had the nerve to ask them for something they were supposed to supply.

I asked for the toothbrush and toothpaste the staff had promised at the interview. Oh, sure, whoever this was (probably my first nurse) said, and promptly forgot about it. She was kind enough to rinse out my support stockings, but didn't think she could find a second pair for me.

I asked if I could have a trash bag where I could reach it from my bed. I wasn't supposed to be walking around, and they kept leaving pill cups and little alcohol towelettes and their packages around me. It seemed stupid to have the only trash receptacle in the room up by the door. Wasn't this a rehab hospital? Wouldn't they want to make things easier for the patients they were trying to rehabilitate?

I asked for my Percocet, which the hospital had been supplying every 4 hours. Before the surgery, I had been sternly warned to keep ahead of the pain – don't wait until it really hurts to take more medication. The hospital had had to be nudged, too, I'll admit, but this place is unbelievable. The nurse's alarm, as I've mentioned, sounds like a screeching smoke alarm. It's horribly annoying. I was lying there in pain, well past my time for my medication, and I didn't want to contribute to the horrible screeching only to be ignored again.

Getting new pitchers of ice water is like pulling teeth. The nurses' aides are supposed to do it. I asked my nurse to do it tonight, and he took the pitcher and, heck, he could have thrown it away for all I know.

Back to last night. At some point when I had a nurse's aide's attention, I asked for more ice water, and she brought it. This is the same one who brought me back from the shower, the one I asked for tissues. I poured myself a glass and spilled it. Some of it went onto my laptop. So I managed to get the nurse's aide back in there to help me mop it up. “See, this is why I need tissues!” I shouted, panic-stricken. She went off again to search for them. This time, she came back...with a fistful of paper towels. Okay, they'd mop up the water, but I wouldn't be blowing my nose on them if I could help it. She brought me a wastebasket liner and taped it to my bed table, too, so she was really trying to be helpful.

Okay, so without tissues, without a toothbrush or toothpaste, and with a severely aching knee, I was ready to call it a day. I struggled out of bed without my walker to turn off the bedside lamp that the first nurse had turned on because she thought it made the room look warm. I hadn't wanted it then, and I didn't want it now, either. Then I reached up to pull the chain to turn out the lamp over my bed, one I assumed was just like the light over my hospital bed. I pulled it, and the light directly over my bed came on. I pulled it again. It went back off. And again, and again...I remembered those light switches they had put up by the door. They wouldn't...would they? They had. Both my roommate's and my over-the-bed lamps (the ones that point towards the ceiling) are controlled by one switch. By the door. In a rehab hospital.

I had closed our door to shut down on some of the din. When I turned off the lights, the room was plunged into darkness. More poor planning, but this was on my part. I found my way back to bed...

And lay there, unable to sleep. The stress of the surgery, the move, and the realization that this place was totally unprepared to rehabilitate people was just too much to process. Why had they put me so close to the nurse's station, when I sleep so lightly? Why were they so unaccommodating?

I'm not sure of the sequence of the next few events, but I don't think I was the one who rang for the nurse. I can't remember what my roommate wanted – probably pain medication that they had scheduled an hour earlier. And an older woman came in (heh – she was probably my age). She did whatever she'd come in to do. One of us, or maybe both of us, mentioned how abandoned we'd felt since we'd been here. She made some placating remarked and left without closing the door. Seems it's against regulations to have the door closed, which doesn't really surprise me. Anyway, I ended up crying. I think my roommate might have been making some of the same complaints over the phone to her husband, very quietly. She might have been crying, too.

The nurse came back, maybe with my roommate's pills, I don't know, and I managed to get her attention. I tearfully spilled out some of the miseries of the day. Not sure of the sequence, as I said, but within a few minutes I had a spare pair of pressure stockings, two boxes of tissues, and an Ambien to help me sleep. Just had to ask the right person...and I can't even remember what she looked like.

Well, I got to sleep eventually, and slept for 4 and a half hours or so. When I woke up, I could hear my roommate talking with a nurse in the bathroom. The toilet was clogged. I knew it had been running slowly and assumed she'd called him because of that. Nope. It had actually overflowed, and when he grabbed something to mop it up, he got her bathrobe with it. Fortunately, the bathrobe didn't get wet. Oh, and it gets better. He didn't know where the plunger was. Maybe they didn't have one. Somebody would know in the morning...

And we hadn't even been here for 24 hours.

It was a great bonding experience, though, and we've become fairly friendly, keeping the curtain between the beds open except for times like when her family's here or one of us is sleeping.

Morning comes and the kitchen staff eventually wheels the trays of food out into the hall outside our door. We are among the last people to be served, of course. My heart sank when I saw my tray. I had specified the night before “NO EGGS FOR BREAKFAST.” And when I lifted the dish, there they were: scrambled eggs. Well, I yelled and screamed. When the aide who delivered it tried to say it wasn't on the order slip, we looked more closely at it, and what do you know? There it was: No eggs for breakfast, and diet jelly, please. (They'd supplied jelly for the two slices of limp toast, but it was regular.) Apparently word got sent down to the kitchen pretty quickly, because the aide came back with another dish, which contained six slices of limp toast which appeared to have been scavenged off of other plates, coffee creamers, and diet jellies. We'll see what I get tomorrow. I'll bet they spit in it.

How are we going to last out another week here? Stay tuned...