Sorry for not updating at all. Am extremely busy with work. Here's an update on my current progress:
So since I went unilateral lengthening I was in no rush with the lengthening. Was lengthening at 1 mm for the first few days and then went down to 0.8 and took several brakes.
The experience hasn't been almost pain free for me as some other Dr. Monegal patients report. But not bad at all. Had mainly medial knee pain when waking up at the morning and other than that it really varied all the time but pain appeared mainly at night but was never terrible or even bad. I did however take 200 tramadol daily (24 hour release) and that might have helped. All in all I would say there was a constant discomfort when immobile, and the worst pain was when waking up around, at around 5/10 (almost always medial knee, I think it was from the locking screw and not muscular pain). Considering some LL stories I've been reading I feel very lucky to have had only mild pain.
You probably notice that I am using past tense. About a day after I stopped lengthening at around 78 mm (about a week ago) the pain stopped completely (including the knee pain). Only discomfort I feel is muscle tightness when immobile for long periods of time. Am currently using one crutch, and hopefully will go unaided in a couple of weeks (and then straight to stage 2 at the beginning of November). My callus is good but not phenomenal so it allowed me to lengthen at a slower pace.
Sleep was ok throughout the process. Again, perhaps thanks to the tramadol. My problem was actually never lack of sleep but I would oversleep constantly. I am not sure if the drugs are to blame for that (I also take ambien for sleep, that's unrelated to the surgery though, had always been on that), as I tend to display such sleep patterns whenever I let myself go on long vacations.
One thing that I did a bit differently than most patients, and I felt worked out great for me, was that I really broke up the lengthening sessions as much as possible. I did that on the advice of a fellow lengthener at the MIC (thanks!) based upon some interesting research. In short, they used an automatic high frequency distractor (which distracts 1/1440 mm every minute) on one limb, while the other limb was lengthened normally at 4x0.24 a day. The research shows that soft tissue adaptation is improved considerably with the high frequency method (which makes some sense as it emulates normal growth best).
So since I was home and as it's so easy to lengthen with fitbone, I lengthened ideally once (0.03 mm) every 30 minutes. I had no considerable nerve pain, no gradual reduction in ROM (altough knee ROM was reduced by surgery and has not recovered much yet, at around 100 now) and had no muscle cramping. Please note that I had horrible flexiblity before the surgery, and yet I feel that my ROM is 100% on my hip joint and only the limited ROM in the knee bothers me a bit, but it has been only about a week since I stopped lengthening. the paper is called "High frequency distraction improves tissue adaptation during leg lengthening in humans" by Gudrun Trøite Aarnes if you want to discuss it with your doc, recommended read anyways.
So my overall experience has been good so far, not too much pain, Dr. Monegal has been very nice and responsive (and I can be quite annoying), and I am very happy with the height. I actually feel that if my legs were equal that I could walk almost normally right now, I feel that the limp I have is more due to the excessive lifts I have on my unlegnthened leg.
Hopefully the good experience continues. Will try to update after my second surgery.
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Topic: Two stage femur CLL, Monegal (Read 3740 times)