RECOVERY - DAY 2

My first night of sleep is now under my belt, although it wasn't that great.  I was hoping the pain meds would just knock me out, but no such luck.  I did have to take a leak 4 times though, which wasn't fun.  Try standing on one leg next time you're taking a leak and let me know what you think.

pre-op

Lauren, Jan, and I just got done eating dinner and it was ridiculous!  Venison pot roast with Brussels sprouts, carrots, celery, onions, and new potatoes.  Holy cow it was so good I'm considering doing this whole hip surgery thing again (actually I'll be doing it again with or without the venison...damn).

Today was a pretty good day.  I wasn't really in any pain, it was just annoying walking around on crutches all day.  The weather was incredible this afternoon (sunny and in the 60's) so I had Lauren make me a pallet out on the grass in the front yard and I just grabbed a book and read for about 2 hours.  It had been a while since I had seen natural light, so this was fantastic.

getting ready for surgery

I think I'm gonna try taking a shower tonight.  I'm starting to smell a little bit.

RECOVERY - DAY 1

The doctor was able to salvage my labrum!  That's the good news...the bad news is that now I am on crutches for a month.  Oh well, I'll deal with it since I'm thankful to have a repaired hip and labrum.

We got some pictures during the surgery from the doctor using the scope-cam, but right now they are just a hard-copy.  I'm going to try to get some electronic versions of them so I can post them on the blog.  Very interesting stuff, and much easier to read than that damn MRI.  Dr. Muller drained the fluid out of my cyst (see MRI picture from last week's post), and now you can see that it looks like a big hole in my femur!  He says it will eventually fill back in with bone and I'll be good as new.

When I woke up in the recovery room I was famished!  Lauren told me that the nurse asked how I was feeling and how I would rate my pain level from 0 to 10, but all I could say was "Omelet."  The nurse kindly informed me that they don't have omelets, but they do have saltine crackers.  All I could say in response was "blah" while sticking my tongue out.  Apparently I was acting like a toddler.

The physical therapist came in right after that to show me the proper way to use crutches.  She helped me stand up, and then I went GHOSTLY WHITE!  I felt so terrible as a result of being so hungry.  I think I freaked her out too because she kept asking if I felt OK and I couldn't even respond.  They sat me back down and then Lauren and her mom went and got me a sandwich and some fruit.  WOW, what a difference a few calories made.  At this point it was close to noon and I had consumed ZERO calories so far.

So after eating the sandwich I was able to pass the crutches test and went home.  Lauren then did the greatest thing any wife has ever done...she made me a 4-egg mushroom broccoli venison omelet and a cup of coffee!!

I'm in good spirits and looking forward to the road to recovery.  It will be a tough challenge, but I'm up for it.  I just took two pain pills, so I'll probably be knocked out shortly.

IT'S GO TIME!

It's 9:15 pm the night before my surgery.  I'm gonna do a little more reading before I actually go to bed, but otherwise it's just about GO-TIME!

I want to thank everyone for the phone calls, e-mails, and text messages wishing me good luck (even you Jordon...you bastard!).  I'll be getting up at 5:00 am tomorrow morning, which is actually the easy part.  I'm not allowed to eat or drink anything before the surgery tomorrow, which will be the real struggle!  I have to be there at 5:45 am, and my surgery will start around 7:00 am.  I hope Dr. Muller has his morning coffee and that he brings his A-game!

Also, I'll be documenting a few things along the way.  First, I decided that I won't shave or get a haircut for my entire rehab.  Here is what I look like tonight (Day 0):

The hair is pretty much already longer than it ever has been, so this will get interesting.  I am allowed to shave my neard, though (that's neck-beard for the uneducated).

Secondly, I'll be tracking my weight as I expect to lose approximately 20 hard-earned pounds (mostly on my legs).  I'm not going to weigh tonight because I just feasted on some scallops, buffalo, and chicken.  The first official weigh-in will be tomorrow morning when I wake up.

Since I will be home for the next 10 days, be sure to check back often as I will likely get VERY bored.  Boredom = Great blog posting.

FRIDAY TRAINING RECAP

UPDATE:  The same day I posted about looking for an Airdyne bike, I found one on Craigslist and went to go check it out!  It worked great (they have a reputation for being built to last) and looked solid too, so I bought it!  I did some intervals on it right when I got home because I have been very frustrated by not being able to do my usual conditioning work.  My interval session looked like this:


1 min warm-up
10 min of 30 seconds “on” and 30 seconds “off”
1 min cool-down

During the “on” portions I am going ALL OUT!!  During the “off” portions I am just going LESS HARD.  Even my “off” portions were hard.

I’m looking forward to doing some more Airdyne work when I get home tonight.

Friday October 16, 2009

Lately my training has included a ton of soft tissue work and prehab stuff.  I’ll continue this basic setup until my surgery (6 more days) and then I’ll have to modify again to accommodate my hip.  Here is what I did today:

EXPLOSIVE
A1 – Med Ball Slams 4x8
A2 – Side-Lying External Rotations 3x10

B1 – Double-Clap Pushups 4x4
B2 – Lying Knee-to-Knee Stretch 3x30 seconds

MAX STRENGTH
C1 – One-Arm Pushups 6x3,3,3,2,2,2 (each arm)
C2 – Quadruped Hip Extensions 3x10 (each leg)

Here is some footage of my One-Arm Pushups.  I’ve worked on them for a little while, so I have managed to progress to a decline variation (feet elevated) for triples and doubles.  I’m not going to failure since this is a max-effort variation.



The Side-Lying External Rotations are for my shoulders (simply preventative in nature) and in between every set I perform foam rolling on all soft tissue (technically it’s not foam rolling because I use a PVC pipe).  The Lying Knee-to-Knee stretch is to work on hip mobility in a minimally stressful way.  The more mobility I have going into surgery, the more easily I will regain it during rehab. The Quadruped Hip Extensions are for glute activation.  One-Arm Pushups are actually a full body exercise since you must generate tension from the tips of your fingers all the way through the tips of your toes.  Any part of your body that isn’t tense will act as an energy leak and therefore the net force you produce (the amount transferred from your points of ground contact to the center of mass) will be reduced.  The hips and glutes are a common area for leakage.

I’ll cap off the day with a mini workout consisting of Airdyne intervals!

HIP IMAGES

I finally got around to extracting some of the images from my x-ray and MRI. The first one is an x-ray of my hip. The femoral head (“ball”) should be pretty round, but if you look closely on my right hip (which is the left side of the picture) you can see that it is not so round (see red circle). The same thing, although less prominent, can be seen on the other hip. I have a tear of my left labrum as well, however it is likely much less severe. Both hips were “popping,” which is why I went to the doctor in the first place, but only the right hip had discomfort associated with it.

This image is just one “slice” of my MRI. Since Lauren is a Radiologist, I definitely needed her help to decipher the MRI slices. She pointed out a bunch of things in the slices to me, but they would be very hard to describe via a blog post, so I am just going to stick to the obvious one. The red circle in this image is a cyst on my femoral head. eMedicine.com defines it as “a common, benign, fluid-containing lesion, usually occurring in the metaphysis of long bones.”  There's apparently about a million different kinds of cysts, but the sample images of a "common bone cyst" looked pretty close to what mine looks like.

There are other parts of the MRI where you can see the tear (if you have a trained Radiologist pointing them out to you) and also where the fluid that was injected into my hip was "leaking" into the neighboring tissue.

Btw, I mentioned in a previous post that this surgery is the same operation that A-rod had this past offseason.  Well his rehab must have gone pretty well because he had another solid year.  In fact, his first swing of the season was a 3-run HR and his last swing of the season was a grand slam!  Even more impressive was the fact that going into the 7th inning of the last regular season game, A-rod was 2 HR's shy of 30 and 7 RBI's shy of 100 (he had a streak going of consecutive seasons with 30+ HR and 100+ RBI).  In the 7th inning, A-rod hit 2 HR's and knocked in 7 runs (a 3-run HR and a grand slam).  Wow.

WHAT I'M WATCHING...

Lauren and I started a new documentary last night called 'Killer at Large' and so far it is very interesting.  It is about the obesity epidemic facing the American people, and here is the official trailer:



One of the more shocking moments occurs when they follow a 12 year old girl from Austin, TX into her liposuction procedure since "she has tried everything else and nothing works."  I'll post a more thorough report when we have finished watching it.

Next in line for documentaries...TYSON.

THE COUNTDOWN IS ON...

Sorry for my brief hiatus from the blog...as you can imagine I've been a bit distracted as a result of my hip situation.  Also, my sister just got married this past weekend so I was out of town Thursday through Sunday.

Anyway, starting now, I will be back on track with regular blog updates.  Today's blog:

THE COUNTDOWN TO HIP SURGERY

In 8 days I will be going under the knife to repair my deformed hip.  It has been really tough for the last several weeks trying to figure out both what I can do and what I should do.  Since I usually work out twice a day everyday, doing lower volume and frequency has been quite a challenge.  Nevertheless, I'm not doing anything stupid.  I haven't done a single thing that I'm not supposed to do since I want to improve my odds of a successful operation as much as possible.  I am extremely anxious though, and I'm ready to start rehab.

So far, my conditioning has been hit the hardest, and unfortunately that is one of the things I enjoy the most.  I've been scouring Craigslist trying to find a Schwinn Airdyne so that I can do some conditioning work (an Airdyne is the bike with the fan in front with arm action too):

Obviously the new ones are a bit pricey, but they usually pop up on Craigslist every so often for about $100.

Other than that, I've been doing extensive soft-tissue work, mobility and flexibility work, and a lot of 1-arm pushups, pullup variations, plank variations, and ab wheel.

I'm betting that I lose about 20 lbs. of lean mass in my legs.  Maybe I'll track that as well on the blog...I will weigh myself tomorrow morning and continue to do so every morning and track the changes.