Less Pain

You may have been able to tell by the last few posts, but I've been feeling better this week.  My hip still hurts, but it hurts a lot less.  It's amazing how bad pain is for my state of mind, and conversely, how good less pain is.  It has helped me better understand the people in rehab who were perpetually bitter.  I know some of those folks were in constant pain.

Last week, I had a follow-up appointment with Dr. Dahners.  He says I'm doing well, and says I can start stretching the hip.  So far, I'm still avoiding that because of the pain, but I'll start doing it soon.

We agreed I will return in a month and we'll take some x-rays to see if the HO is growing back.  Then we'll discuss the other hip.  I told him I don't plan to do the other hip until the first one feels a lot better, but it's progressing, so we'll see how it feels in a month.

The other thing we did was remove the staples from the surgery.  Here's what that looked like.

Neat!

I thought the device that removed the staples was pretty interesting.  It bends the staple in half backwards which retracts the ends.  I still don't understand how they get the staples in in the first place, but that's a different issue.