Karger... sorry I missed your question about why my recovery was worse than average. It has to do with the amount of post-op pain I had. After my wife's ADR surgery, I could never even get her to say she was in pain... "I'm uncomfortable" is all I could get out of her. She was up and about the day of her surgery and we were sightseeing just a few days later.
Most of my adult life, I was a really serious athlete. In the years before my spine surgeries, I played soccer 6 days a week and went rock-climbing and skydiving several times a month. I like to believe that I have a very high pain tolerance and still see it today as I have done nearly ALL of my dozens of facet injections, epidurals, costo-vertebral joint injections, intercostal nerve blocks and discograms without ANY sedation. I usually watch the monitor during the procedure. In first day post-op, I literally passed out from the pain twice when I tried to get up to go to the bathroom. I was more than a week post-op before I could walk the 1/2 mile to the clinic, while I watched other patients sightseeing 6 miles/day at less than a week post-op. I was scheduled to come home on day 10, but there was not way I could have (reasonably) made the trip home. I rescheduled and came home on day 15.
There are some interesting trade-off's in waiting till day 15 and I believe that most patients will think that is too long. Call me and we can discuss it... too much to type here.
When are you scheduled.
Mark
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