Surgery

Just got back from Kuching yesterday. Got sms from sister earlier last week that my father was having surgery the following Thursday. So I flew back to Kuching Wednesday.


Total Knee Replacement
After years of suffering from Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), my father finally decided that he had had enough. So he listened to the doctor and went for the total knee replacement surgery, on both knees. This is still OK considering some even have to do this on both knee and pelvic joints. Before this I sort of knew that the disease was arthritis, but not specifically rheumatoid. In fact, I am not even sure if my father knew what he was suffering from!


















I have seen the x-ray and I think the prosthetic looked exactly like this one in the picture. The surgery took 6 hours, and it was not as straight forward as per normal. According to the doctor due to prolonged damage to RA and subsequently bad posture, the knee joint was no longer straight and scar tissues were accumulating. So he spent a lot of time fixing that.

Just 5 days after surgery, my father had been able to walk(on crutches of course) and the pain was gone. Now he is recovering doing physio to recover the muscle strength at the joint as well as getting the coordination between joint movements and the brain right. No surgery complications, so everything looks good now.

I guess my point here is that surgery was quite cool. Especially when it can show elderly people, who are understandably sceptical (even I myself would think twice if I were to replace both my knees), what modern medicine can do.