Surgery: The Real Deal, but Not Always a Silver Bullet

Surgery — it is often part of living with longterm chronic illness, especially rheumatoid arthritis. After years and years of joint swelling and irritation, eventually you are left with bare bone on bare bone, and that’s painful, to say the least. The only solution is joint replacement, and that means surgery.

The thing is, like me, many people go into their first surgeries thinking it is a magic bullet, a more or less instant cure-all for whatever is ailing them, and that’s so far from the truth that it’s laughable. So, today, we will talk about the "real deal" of surgery.

A botched ankle surgery

Four and a half. That’s the answer I give when people ask me how many joints I have had replaced. This includes 2 hips, a shoulder, an ankle, and an ankle again — but not completely, thus my answer of "4 and a half."

The original ankle surgery was botched, crooked from the day they took the cast off, and it eventually curled under, similar to a club foot. After a decade or so of walking on the side of my right foot, I had it corrected last year, but the original botched ankle replacement is still in there, somewhere... So, like I said, 4 and a half.

Surgery is no easy fix

My surgeries started back in the halcyon days of free AOL discs and clip-on pagers. Yes, it was that long ago when I got my first hip replaced. I was just a babe, a mere 17 years on this Earth, when the pain of jagged bone rubbing against jagged bone became too much to bear. So, my mother did the research and found the best juvenile hip replacement guy in Manhattan, and we jumped in with both feet. No pun intended. This is how we learned the hard way that surgery is no easy fix and certainly not something to be taken lightly.

I can see how anyone who doesn’t have personal experience with major surgery can think that it is a silver bullet that can kill whatever is wrong in one fell swoop. After all, all the shows and movies people see tell us that even if you have open heart surgery with triple bypass and valve replacement, you will be sitting upright and talking with a smile on your face within a few short hours. Not only that, but it will restore your quality of life to when you were 17 and could eat 2 whole pizzas and leap a tall building in a single bound. Right? TV says it, so it must be true.

Joint replacement is major reconstructive work

Unfortunately, the reality of surgery is much, much different. There’s an old saying that goes, "There’s no such thing as minor surgery," and it’s true. Even small procedures carry a significant amount of risk, and there is never a 100 percent guarantee of a positive outcome. Not to mention that general anesthesia alone carries the risk of you never waking up.

But a hip replacement wouldn’t even be considered a "minor surgery." It is major reconstructive work, which I know now, but my mother and I did not know it at the time. Why? Because the doctor played it to us like it was a nothing event that he does 17 times a day, and I should be good to go in a few weeks. We stupidly believed him.

A 3-day hospital stay turned into 3 weeks

The reality of the situation was that, after the hip replacement, I lost all feeling on the left side of my left leg and the top of my left foot. Turns out, they pulled too hard on one of the nerve bundles as they were working. Oopsie!

In addition, the "3-day hospital stay" turned into a 3-week hospital ordeal because I had to go to an orthopedic rehab floor to learn how to walk again on the left leg that they had left half-bereft of feeling. Even after I went home, I hobbled for a good 6 months before I got my mojo back, and it was painful and miserable and hard work. It turns out, though, that surgery is more often like this than it is a "breeze" that will solve everything without any future complications.

Preparing for surgery and managing expectations

Now, I don’t want to sour you on surgery. It is often a necessary and unfortunate part of longterm RA, but there are things you can do to prepare.

Take every procedure seriously and understand the risks, no matter what the doctors are telling you. Expect that there will be a moderate to long road of recovery , and if there isn’t, then you will be happily surprised. Don’t get caught unprepared because you thought the opposite and then got saddled with a year of PT and corrective orthopedic devices.

Finally, manage your expectations, especially with RA. You may only get to 85 percent of "normal" when all is said and done, but that’s still 85 percent more than you had before, so it’s as close to a win as those of us with longterm chronic illness get.

Know what you're getting into

When your doctor says the word "surgery," it can be scary, for sure, but as long as you keep both eyes open and know what you are getting into, it won’t catch you off guard like it did me and my mother. Even if you have the smoothest-talking doctor since George Clooney, just know that no matter what TV says, it’s never easy-peasy 1-2-3. It’s more like hardy-wardy 9-1-1. Ha! Talk soon.