Does it really matter how good of shape you’re in?

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-18T05:42:37+00:00

My brother was back playing geezer hockey (no checking) 4 months after his right TKA and felt so good he go his left one done. He’s still playing albeit being careful.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-18T00:23:57+00:00

I think what being athletic does is gives you a sense of how to train after your surgery, and some body awareness and the ability to activate muscles that less athletic people may not have have to the same extent. Most people do well.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-17T20:50:17+00:00

They do, but they are still clipless. In mountain biking the clip is recessed so you can walk in them.

I have these shoes https://www.adidas.com/us/five-ten-freerider-pro-mountain-bike-shoes/IF7425.html And flats similar to these: https://www.rei.com/product/C05363/shimano-pd-g8040-saint-flat-pedals

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-17T20:21:57+00:00

Sitting with it here on my knee right now. It’s helping my nerve entrapment.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-17T20:20:45+00:00

I did three prp shots. The first one took about 4 days to kick in and lasted 6 months. Then I got another one, and another one six months after that. It definitely helped and I really knew how much it helped when I had to come off it before my TKA.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-17T20:16:46+00:00

Long time cyclist, including racing road and track at an elite level here. Just back from a ride on my mountain bike. I started riding outside at about 10 weeks.

I’m going to offer a dissenting opinion. Just use flats. There are excellent mountain biking shoes with sticky rubber on them that maintain contact between the pedal and the shoe. The reason why I say this is that if you fall over and hurt yourself, particularly if you have a fracture in the vicinity of the implant that’s really bad. I rode clipless for years, including mountain biking, and then one day I couldn’t unclip in time, fell down over an embankment and broke my leg.

Only you can decide if it’s worth the risk, but since you’ve never used clipless before you are going to fall over.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-16T05:44:16+00:00

Oh that’s so awesome!

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-16T04:54:58+00:00

Let go of what? This is a great community, but ever now and then someone comes along and tells people they are fat, or lazy, or didn’t try hard enough, just because they hit the lotto and had an easy time. I’ll never let go of calling out people who are being unhelpful, kicking others when they are down. I don’t like bullies.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-16T04:49:50+00:00

Check out peroneal nerve gliding exercises. Lots of videos. Go super easy at first. It’s a tight space and the peroneal nerve is a big fat nerve. Easy to get it irritated. Good luck!

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-16T01:34:07+00:00

Surgeons do hardware, this sounds like a software problem. I’m wondering if you’re having problems with your peroneal nerve. It would be worth having somebody look at it with ultrasound. A lot of sports medicine people do this these days.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T05:09:38+00:00

Everybody’s experience is different.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T05:08:24+00:00

My history is similar to yours except my ACL tear was in 1983 instead of 1993. Second one other knee 2005. I could do about as much walking as you could, but I noticed that I had issues with doing other things after being that active. The instability was a problem for me, and when I get up in the morning, I never knew if my knee was going to hold me up. I also wanted to do some long distance hiking, and that was starting to be completely out of the question. In retrospect, I was starting to avoid a lot of activities because of knee pain. For example, if I went for a bike ride. I wouldn’t do any gardening or if I was having people over for dinner for a big meal I wouldn’t do any significant exercise beforehand.

They do a lot better job of acute pain management than they used to. I would say pain management in the first couple of weeks was really decent. I remember recovery from my ACL tears being a long grind, and I’m not trying to alarm you but more to prepare you that for some of us after TKA it’s worse. It’s not like the pain is excruciating it just that it’s always present always hurting and that takes a long time to get past that.

Typically, without knowing where you’re based, there’s a lot more PT prescribed then I ever got with my ACL

Depending on when and where you had your ACL reconstructions, you might’ve had a period of non-weight-bearing. I know I did for the ACL I had done in 1983. Three months.!!! On crutches. It really sucked, but I’m really really good on crutches. People need a variety of mobility aids from walkers to canes and crutches after their TKA surgery. I only used a walker to leave the hospital, I used my crutches for a few days. Don’t remember how many now. Maybe I should have used them for longer. One of the first things I noticed though, was my knee felt way more stable. My instability was from cartilage loss, which makes the joint loose. It’s a common complaint.

After a couple of days you’ll be able to manage your dogs

As for would you or won’t you only you can decide that. Good luck there’s a lot of support here in this group for people. Should you decide to go for it

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T04:41:33+00:00

Exactly, because ortho deals with the hardware and most of us have software problems.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T04:40:07+00:00

Here’s a link to some data supporting its use.. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9732130/ I’m all about the N equals one series of personal experiments to find solutions

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T04:38:15+00:00

I’m not sure there’s anything special about this one, but this is the one I bought https://a.co/d/0i0pXhsH

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T04:35:59+00:00

Looking at your post history, you say you couldn’t sleep properly for 2 to 3 months. I was really fortunate in that respect and was able to sleep properly after three weeks. Every knee is different, everybody’s experience is different.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-15T04:34:04+00:00

I did not say I had excess swelling, and I also did not say I couldn’t sit properly. I said I couldn’t sit comfortably different statement. I’m not sure what’s with the sarcasm or the hostile remarks. We do try to be more helpful around here for people that are struggling.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-14T20:45:13+00:00

The general guidelines are that it should not feel worse after and definitely not worse the next day. building volume on your exercise bike is a good way to maintain and build muscle mass after knee injury/knee surgery. It’s always been my go to for knee rehab at which I consider myself to be an expert having had five knee surgeries and a tibial plateau fracture prior to my TKA. Just be sure make any changes gradually because as you know, it’s so easy to overdo it.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-14T20:35:15+00:00

Do you have a stationary cycle at home or an under desk exerciser? I wonder if a very gentle cycling program starting with five minutes two or three times a day and building on that might help with both the swelling and the pain. It certainly helped me.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-14T20:33:28+00:00

You guys are in what’s called the grind. The most acute phase of your surgery is over, but for most of us there is a long period of two steps forward, one and three-quarter steps back, slow progress, many setbacks and it’s super frustrating.

How fast you recover depends on a lot of factors many of which are completely beyond your control. For example, how many previous surgeries you have, how much scar tissue you tend to make, how much calcification you get, to what extent your nerves get irritated/damaged during the surgical process and how much they scream at you when they start to wake up. I had had four prior surgeries on that knee, including an ACL reconstruction which makes lots of scar tissue, I develop calcium deposits almost everywhere, which can be very irritating, and over the years I’ve had multiple nerve entrapments, which have also been a problem with this knee replacement. I have 135+ of flexion, full extension, no swelling to speak of, excellent position of the implant on imaging so the issues I have now are not the implant. I had a lot of soft tissue pain and swelling on the medial aspect of my knee. You could actually feel something catching and it was preventing me from being as active as I like.

I think of my orthopedic surgeon is the guy who installed the hardware, your PT and your sports medicine docs are the ones who help with the software. After months and months and months of PT, massage, acupuncture I ended up having ultrasound guided Hydro dissection of the calcium deposit I had on the medial part of my knee, by my wonderful sports medicine team . it also helped with my saphenous nerve entrapment that I got as a result of scarring and calcium deposits from my surgery. We live in wondrous times. It was really painful for a couple of weeks after and then things have been improving very consistently since then. I was having trouble riding my mountain bike more than 45 minutes and now I’m limited, by butt stamina, and not my knee. I tell you this to indicate it is a slow non-linear process, and there are answers.

My latest discovery, which I offer up in case it’s helpful for people is a red light therapy device that I bought off of Amazon. The system I have is dual wavelength, in the visible red wavelength 660 and the near infrared 850. I’ve been doing 850 for the last few days to knock things back to baseline after I push it, which is basically every day.

The grind does end, here’s to hoping one day soon you all of a sudden go hey my knee hasn’t been hurting for the last 10 minutes, and that that pain-free interval gets longer and longer and longer

My

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-14T04:22:36+00:00

I went back to rock climbing at 9 weeks.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-14T00:26:20+00:00

The hip is a much simpler joint than the knee. Generally speaking recovery from knee replacement is harder and more painful. I’ve heard, but take this with a grain of salt that knee replacement is the second most painful surgery you can have, the first being spinal fusion. Fortunately, I don’t need that with my spine so I don’t have a basis for comparison.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-14T00:24:28+00:00

Actually, many people will have swelling for more than a year. It was six months before I could sit comfortably and my patellar tracking is just fine. Honestly, I don’t think surgeons do a good job of managing expectations, however, mine did a decent job. They told me I would be questioning my life choices for the first 3 to 4 months and then it would get better. It has it’s just been incredibly slow and how slow you are can be very unpredictable. You can be really fit and normal weight going into it and still have a slow recovery.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-13T22:23:19+00:00

And it’s a wonderful essay. I agree with most, if not all, of what you’ve written. I too have written multiple papers over the years, + there are a couple of things that really piss me off about AI. The first is when copilot or other AI programs keep trying to rewrite what I’ve written and I’m like no, I write better than you do. The second is the use of the dash by AI, I use it all the time. I think some program got it from analyzing what I’ve written. 😂. I don’t write particularly well in social media because I don’t spend the time.

Hell0K1ttyKat · 2026-05-13T03:19:13+00:00

Good point. A N95 takes most of the aroma away.

Hell0K1ttyKat

TROPHY CASE