Hip reconstruction - recovery, week 4

... See previous post - Hip reconstruction - recovery - week 3.

Day 24 - Follow-up visit with surgeon today. He seems very pleased. He said that in many orthopaedic procedures, situations arise which need to be dealt with, but my procedure was "text-book". Yay!

He gave me some photos taken during the procedure, which don't really mean much unless you know what all the bits mean. But what he also explained was something I wasn't clear on before - how the tendon is actually bolted into the bone. I had a visual of drilling a hole halfway in and then somehow fixing one end of the tendon down inside. But no - they drill all the way THROUGH, and bolt it on the outside! A bit like an ACL (knee) op - here's a picture of what THAT looks like:

(There are no images like this of my hip procedure because it's still so new).

Day 26/27 - Managed to get out of the house to watch my son play sport on Saturday morning, and to watch my daughter perform in a festival on Sunday morning. Then needed nana-naps in the afternoon. Crutches/recovery is quite tiring...

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Hip reconstruction - recovery, week 3

Warning - graphic images.

... See previous post - Hip reconstruction - recovery - week 2.

Day 15 - I have so many lovely friends, lots of visitors. :) :) Visited physio for the first time. "What have you been doing so far?" "Nothing! Bored!" "Good, keep doing that, see you in 2 weeks". #sigh

Day 16 - Healing... bruises are starting to look old and not-quite-so-gross:


Day 19 - Finally able to drive again! Not very far though, it hurts to sit for very long - just enough to pick kids up and drop them off!

Can finally drive! Even if I can't get out :-P #day19 #hipreconstruction #ligamentumteres #recovery

Day 23 - Hip is starting to look quite neat but the knee wound is still a bit messy:

Hip (left) looking better than the knee at the moment! #day23 #gettingbettereveryday #hipreconstruction #ligamentumteres #recovery

Week 4...

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Hip reconstruction - recovery, week 2

Warning - graphic images.

... See previous post - Hip reconstruction - recovery - week 1.

Day 8 - Some lovely hip bruising and nice bandages:

Nice bruising eh?! #day8 #hipreconstruction #ligamentumteres #recovery

Day 10 - Have had some lovely visitors but not entirely sure what I said to any of them - Endone and Tramadol make me very drowsy! Visited GP this afternoon to get the sutures out, only to discover they are dissolving sutures inserted under the skin and therefore can't be removed. She removed all the dressings though and said it looked really good. I thought it looked hideous but I've never been good at gore... :-/

Day 13 - Happy Birthday to me! It took several hours to get up, fed, showered and dressed but I managed to get out of the house for a birthday lunch with husband and kids. Then back home to bed.

Week 3...

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Hip reconstruction - recovery, week 1

Warning - graphic images.

... See previous post - Hip reconstruction - background.

I was lucky enough to be scheduled first thing in the morning - yay! I'd sat around fasting until after 3pm for both of my previous arthroscopes so I figured I'd done my time! However, the physio had told me there were some highly skilled orthopaedic surgeons visiting from Europe who were quite excited about my procedure and would probably spend 5-7 hours taking notes afterwards, so I suspect the timing may have been more about them than me... oh well, whatever works!

Mr O'Donnell visited in the late afternoon and said it had all gone really well, and was the smoothest procedure he'd done so far. Yay! He said he'd also cleaned up the hip capsule and tightened up a few things, and shaved some bone to make it smoother. Yikes. He advised me to take it very easy as the graft needed time to attach properly, and to do everything the physio said.

Here I am the night after the surgery, clearly drugged to the eyeballs LOL:

All done! Home tomorrow. Thanks for all the messages of support :) <3 #hipreconstruction #ligamentumteres #recovery

Day 5 post-op - Due to the tendon removal from the knee, I'd had a lot of swelling and developed what my friend described as "cankles" - by day 5 it had started to resemble a real ankle again:

Hello, ankle! Nice to see you back! First time it's been smaller than my thigh in a week. Knee & hip still disasters though :/ #hipreconstruction #ligamentumteres #recovery

Day 7 - I can move around on crutches very slowly but I keep getting dizzy and feeling faint so I'm supposed to just take it easy.

Week 2...

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WEB310 - Case Study

For WEB310 - Web Play, Online Games and Gamification - we had to create a Case Study.

create a media artifact containing a case study introducing a game or game genre to a general viewer/reader.

Here's mine: http://prezi.com/hdpxfi6relwg/

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