I think I can speak to this a little because of my burst appendix last year and my wife's recent revision to her knee replacement yesterday. Two years ago my wife had a complete right knee replacement which basically means they open up the knee and put a titanium cap on the upper bone at the knee and cut off the top of the bottom bone and put a titanium receiver on the bottom bone. In between the upper titanium piece and the lower titanium piece is a piece of plastic that acts like your meniscus which cushions your new titanium knee from just becoming two metal object grinding against each other. This plastic often stays viable for up to 20 years or 10 years or less if you are overweight. So, when the plastic wears out you have to have a revision to replace the plastic and to put a new plastic synthetic Meniscus in.
However, in my wife's case her muscles were too loose for the size of plastic that was put in originally which caused her leg to lock when going down stairs so she was in danger of falling and couldn't walk at all on uneven surfaces like trails and other uneven places where dirt or rocks are.
The scariest thing for her the last 2 years has been going down an escalator for example. So, I or someone had to stand in front of her if her leg gave out suddenly to catch her.
So, her insert went from 11 mm to 14 mm and immediately she realized this was going to work by the way it behaved when she stood up the first time.
However, I have been freaked out since at least January of dealing with all this again because I also had a burst appendix last March and with an emergency operation the night before Easter 2015 I survived this without dying or serious physical complications like many people have who don't just die outright from it eventually. However, I did have a form of PTSD from it caused by not being able to sleep for 20 to 30 days which was the worst thing I ever had to survive in my life. Because if you cannot sleep eventually there is no way to distinguish real from unreal and this is pretty scary to survive.
So, the trauma of all that and wondering if my quality of life was going to be good enough for me to choose to stay alive was also traumatic for me this past year too. So, preparing this last few months for my wife's operation just got worse and worse for me because of the traumas of the past year. So, finally about a week ago I knew I was in trouble psychologically and started taking aryuvedic medicine called Serotone and Gabatone which cause your brain to temporarily increase serotonin production. This keeps you from having panic attacks or going into clinical depression temporarily until you can get to a better balance point. So, after a week of this I think I will try without it tonight since this surgery was about 10% as bad as her original knee replacement and the doctor even cut on the same scar on her knee so there will be no new scar just the old one again from the knee replacement two years ago now.
So, here's the thing. You have to develop not only a physical strategy for surviving your surgeries and surgeries of other members of your family. You have to develop psychological strategies that don't leave you a basket case at the end of your surgery or a member of your family's or a friend.
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