I have had a little Knee Setback. (Is this now a Knee Blog? Will there ever be a day when we talk about anything other than The Knee?) Today I am 11 weeks post-surgery, and yesterday I did one of the only things the surgeon told me not to do, which was to fall on the knee. I can’t even quite say how it happened, because to me it seemed like I was just suddenly hitting the hardwood floor, first with the knee, then with my cheekbone. There was that Bad Feeling of when something theoretically avoidable has happened and you can’t undo it and now there are going to be a long series of consequences—like when a child barfs in the car, or when you drop a full cup of cranberry juice and it goes EVERYWHERE. Plus I was a little stunned. What just happened? Did I not even try to catch myself with my hands? (This morning there was a big bruise on the outer/back edge of my left hand.) I do fall relatively often for an adult, but I don’t think I have hit my FACE in a fall since childhood.
William was home, and called out from the other room “Are you okay?,” and I said that I was, but that I had fallen. I got up, thinking about how the surgeon had said that if I fell, I should go to the ER to have the knee checked out. I wondered if that still applied 11 weeks later, or if that was just for the immediate post-surgical time. As I wondered that, I noticed my pant leg was wet. I have fallen many, many, MANY times in my life, and I have skinned many a knee, and there has never been this much blood this quickly. There was a cut across the top of the knee, perpendicular to the incision scar. The pants I was wearing were not torn or damaged. I still don’t know how/why the cut happened.
I had just made some lunch, after being away from the house for six hours for work and for physical therapy, and I was also feeling stunned and dismayed and embarrassed and very uncertain what to do, so I took a big chunk of folded paper towels and pressed it against my knee, and propped my leg up on a chair, and said that the plan was to eat my lunch while the bleeding stopped, after which I would call the surgeon’s office and find out if I was seriously supposed to go to the ER for this.
I ate about a quarter of my lunch but I’d lost my appetite. And the bleeding was not stopping. William was nervous and asking if he should drive me to the ER. I thought I could drive myself, until I stood up and the bleeding was much worse. So he drove me to the emergency room. There must be a button they can push at reception for a bleeder, because someone from triage came right out, asked me good-naturedly if I was bleeding on her carpet, and put a 2-inch-thick pile of gauze on my knee and wrapped it with that stretchy elastic stuff that sticks to itself but not to your skin. I am not exaggerating how thick the stack of gauze was.
She then brought me right into triage as soon as I was done checking in, which made me think they were not busy, but I was wrong: this was my first visit to the ER where I spent the whole time in the hallway because every room was full. Because my situation was NOT dire and I was NOT miserable, this was splendid: I got to hear lots of interesting little tidbits about other people and their situations. I was right between TWO nurse telephones, so I heard them describing all sorts of things to their colleagues in this and other hospitals. I was in a cluster of four hallway patients, so I heard their nurses/doctors talking to them about what their issues were. More patients were escorted by police officers than I’d expected. I played on my phone and tried to act like I wasn’t listening.
A nurse brought me an ice pack and a blanket. A PA (physician’s assistant) came by to ask me what brought me here today, and I told her, and she said the plan was (1) x-rays; (2) waiting for a radiologist to assess the x-rays; (3) stitches; (4) possibly a tetanus shot, if my records showed it had been awhile since my last tetanus shot. And those are the four things we did. It took about four hours.
I had never had stitches while awake before. Oh, I guess I had them after my c-sections, but at the time I could not feel a single thing below my ribs so those don’t count. The PA said the worse part would be the three lidocaine shots I’d have before the stitching, and she said those WOULD hurt quite a bit going in—but happily those were done on the part of my knee that is still numb from the knee surgery! I hardly felt them! The stitching itself was conceptually icky, but not painful; I got 7 stitches, which is a pleasing number. The tetanus shot was pretty painful as arm-shots go, but was over quickly and then didn’t keep hurting, though my arm is somewhat sore today.
I had thought that the stitches would pretty much put an end to the bleeding, but that was not the case. I’d thought that once I’d gone to bed and woken up in the morning, THEN the bleeding would have stopped, and that seemed to be the case, but then I went to work and that definitely made things worse, and I left after a couple of hours when the thick bandage failed to be sufficient. I am now trying more advanced resting, to see if I can make it stop, and I think it has mostly worked, but I also think it’s a difficult location for that. My knee is pretty swollen again now, and purple again. There are unpleasant intermittent burning/stinging/zinging sensations on my skin, not where the stitches are but on other parts of the knee.
I am trying not to worry about literally everything about this. I am trying not to project doom into the future (“I guess I am going to be the kind of old person who lightly jostles against a chair and ends up covered in bruises”/”Maybe these are the first indications of what will turn out to be a blood-clotting disorder”/”Is my skin weirdly fragile and breakable now?”/”I am going to be put in A Home so much earlier because of this falling thing”). My whole leg was purple and swollen after the knee surgery, to the point where the visiting home physical therapist was quietly alarmed and got on the phone to the surgeon’s office, and the surgeon was just like “Yep, that happens sometimes,” and indeed the purple gradually cleared itself away. Probably I should take one of my leftover painkillers (NO I did not get rid of them responsibly) and try not to think about it.
Oh! And I should say that the x-rays showed the new $58,000 knee (our co-pay was $180) was just fine. Everything where it should be, no sign of injury or misalignment. “Unremarkable left knee,” was the conclusion. I am trying not to imagine that my knee feels weird or that I’m walking weird or that things are hitching a little with each step (“Maybe I slammed something out of alignment and now it will have to be taken out and replaced”/”Maybe the surgeon will have to do another surgery to adjust it”/”Maybe he will need to adjust it from the outside and it will be very painful and icky”).