Surgery News

Once again it's Sunday night, and I find myself waiting for the late game to start.  Bengals at Steelers.  Probably won't be a great game. In the meantime, I'll tell you about my appointment with the surgeon while I wait.

On Thursday, I finally met with Dr. Dahners about my HO surgery.  I was expecting him to tell me to come back in 3 more months for another CT scan, but he basically just asked me when I wanted to have the surgery.  He said I could do it as early as November, but after thinking about it, I told him January.  I wanted to wait until after the holidays.

Then he sent me for some blood tests.  I got a call on Friday telling me the chemical that indicates conditions are right for bone creation were too high, and that January is the earliest they could try the surgery, but they'll have to test me again and see if the levels are low enough then.  So maybe I'm having the surgery in January and maybe I'm not.  We'll see.

I learned some stuff about the surgery.  Dr. Dahners said he looked at the CT scan and I've got a lot of extra bone in my hips.  The bone in front of the hips is blocking my movement.  He said they will have to do one hip at a time in two separate surgeries.  He said I'll lose a lot of blood, and they don't want to give me a blood transfusion because it increases the risk.

He said they won't be able to remove all of the bone, but they can get a lot of it and I should get some of my range of movement back.  I don't know how much.  We'll see.

I will probably be in the hospital about 3 days after each surgery, and the time between the surgeries will depend largely on how well I recover.  Best case would be one month, worst case would be "several months" which I interpret as 3 months.  Again, we'll see.

I'm hoping they'll put me back in rehab for a while after the surgeries, but I expect I'll be pretty injured afterward, so I'll probably need a lot of help until I get better.  I'm hoping I can still count on my friends during that time, and I think my family will probably make time to come help me.  I think it's likely to be unpleasant.

Either way, I hope we can get this party started sooner rather than later.  I'm ready to get my flexibility back.