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FAQ - I am scared! Will it be painful? How long will I be in hospital/ take to recover / get back to work/ be able to drive a car?
Generally, hip and knee surgeries are not particularly painful. Of the two, the knee, if anything, tends to be more uncomfortable and take longer to regain a full range of motion. There is huge individual variation but most knee or hip replacements/resurfacings will be in hospital for 6 nights or less. Some brave souls have been out in as little as 2 days. Arthroscopic procedures are day-case or sometimes overnight.
It is perfectly normal to be scared! What always helps is voicing or expressing the fears you have well in advance so the team can help you through them. If you leave it to the last moment, everyone gets edgy and that makes things worse. If you feel embarrassed to tell your surgeon, call the secretary and speak to him/her first.
Recovery is a very loose term that means different things to different people. Recovery is also a gradual process that is incapable of exact measurement. So there are guidelines which represent the average or usual patient experience, but you may be much slower or much faster. General fitness and which procedure was carried out will obviously influence the speed of recovery, but another powerful factor is patient personality or character and therefore general approach or attitude. The more positive and determined the patient, the less problems are encountered during recovery. So once you have considered all the options or facts, make up your mind, and do not dither!
Giving precise recovery times here for each procedure is therefore potentially misleading, and I would say you should ask your surgeon for an outline, based on his/her experience.
