Steve’s first knee surgery was in fall 1971. He tore some cartilage in his right knee playing college football and his knee has never been the same. He lifts weights to keep his muscle strong around his knee and that has helped although it is sore and achy much of the time. The second surgery was in spring 1992 when his knee had come to the point of hurting all the time. He had an arthroscopic surgery to clean out all the loose cartilage and scrape away some of the scar tissue. For some reason his recovery from that surgery was long and painful, more so than expected. He told me to break his arm if he ever said he was going to have surgery on that knee again. Fast forward to September 2010 when Steve was lifting weights and something broke loose in the knee and caused some real problems. He went to the orthopedic surgeon and he was told he may need surgery again, but to wait a couple of weeks and see if it got better. Well….it didn’t get better, in fact it was painful for him all the time. So last week Steve had his third arthroscopic knee surgery to clean out cartilage, bone spurs and scrape and smooth the joint surfaces.
This is Steve a couple of hours after surgery when I set him up with a chocolate milk shake, an ice pack, the remote and a soft pillow for an afternoon of recovery. Steve is not much to watch TV so I found him later answering emails on his iphone.
The surgeon warned that he would have quite a bit of pain the next couple of days and it would take about a month for full recovery. But much to our surprise, Steve’s pain has been minimal, in fact he says it is no more than he was experiencing before the surgery. Praise the Lord!
This photo was taken on Saturday in the lab where we work, right before we went in to the Aggie football game. Surgery Thursday at 1pm and at the Aggie game on Saturday at 6:00pm. What a trooper. We are so thankful for the good result he has had so far, but he realizes that he may have a few more weeks before he can call it a complete success.
No comments:
Post a Comment