14/03/2021
I have officially stopped lengthening, I am at 6.5cm. At the moment my ROM will do with some improvement and also get my right knee to straighten more. I feel my body can accommodate more lengthening but considering i am already completely satisfied with my height, I will stop here. My frame removal date is most likely going to be for the 26th, still yet to confirm and that will give me time i advance to give my legs a little break before doing another procedure which I am completely dreading although it will probably feel amazing to have these things off once and for all.
I had really bad knee pain last night which was not common at all considering I went a month with literally zero pain and now for it to hurt all of a sudden felt a bit strange but it is gone now and feels normal again. Although my ROM is bad I have no pain in the area and my walking is not too bad although I am not fully satisfied with my right leg. My right positions itself into an outward position and I have to put effort to actually make at more straight as I am trying my best not to lose the ability to walk the way I used to. I have many plans for the months to come so recovery is extremely important to me. I want to get walking as soon as possible so once these frames are off and the cooling off period of the surgery and surgical pain has passed I will be dedicating a lot of effort to physical therapy which should significantly boost my recovery period and improve my ROM. If anyone has done external femur can you please give me a bit of insight with the whole removal process, I am told by many that straight after the removal process the ROM gets even worse and cannot be improved for a certain period of time. Does anyone know why that is? has me very curious.
Travelling post frame removal : I am catious person by nature and also a pessimist which gives me a sense of paranoia reason being. Many patients report that the frame removal pain is the same as the pain we experience from the first initial surgery. Now, most patients have those post surgical pains for about 2 weeks but for me it went on for a minimum of 1 month which is where my paranoia comes in that the same pain will go on for another month after removal. If that pain is still present even at the end of the post month that would mean that I will want to stay in Turkey for a longer duration, not that I have a problem with that but just as a side note I thought that I would mention it. Although this could just be a thought as anything can happen and maybe I wont have pain as long as the first surgery where in that case I would be able to return home by the end of April which wold be great. I also had this obsession that I did not want to return unless I was able to walk properly but talking to so many patients the recovery period for walking seems to be all over the place, some people walk after 3 weeks removal and others take months. I am confident it will not take anything longer than 2 months and by month 4 I could start weight training my legs again as I have gotten skinny in the past month or two. I have basically forgotten the feeling of being "free" and without the frames. The time when walking around and even running was taken for granted, psyched to go back to all that. In 6 months I am also returning to my home country for the first time in 5 years which is amazing. There is a lot of things waiting for me so to speak that I have to be ready for so I cannot make any errors and mistakes that would lead to God forbid bad outcomes which was also another reason for stopping the lengthening a bit too early. I like to think that I have a pretty good intuition and my intuition told me to stop so thats what I am doing.
A word of advice for those who are reading this and considering to do LL, please just listen to your body. 1 extra centimetre does not mean anything in real life but to your body can be a disaster in the making. I can assure you that at a certain point in your lengthening phase you WILL reach a gain that will make you feel 100 percent comfortable at that height but the greed part will be telling you to do more. Do not give in and just stop, the people that have not have had all the ty outcomes you can imagine. Remember why we all wanted to do this surgery in the first place, not to be tall but to feel normal.