Depending on your reaction to the anaesthetic, you might wake up in the morning after a long sleep, but equally, you may have been dozing on and off all night. In either case, you will likely feel a bit comforted when you notice day breaking. Congratulations - you've gotten through the first night! :)
Hopefully you won't be in too much pain, but you will certainly feel a little sore. Don't be afraid to contact a nurse for more pain medication if you need it.
Try to eat breakfast when they bring it out. You may not feel too hungry, but once you start eating you may find that your appetite returns, and it is important to start putting some fuel back into your body. You will have lost a bit of blood, and your body has just gone through a bit of a traumatic experience. You need to recover! Food will help you do that :)
You will have a number of visits over the course of the morning to prepare you to leave hospital. One thing you may want to prepare yourself for a little is when they remove the drain tube from your knee. In the picture below, you can see the drain going into my left knee, and you can see where the drain on my right knee leaked overnight and got a bit of blood on me. Yucky! The nurses will clean this off for you though.
If you are having your first knee operation, you will almost certainly have had the donor ligament taken from the same leg as the reconstructed knee, so you will only have one drain, which will be attached to that leg. The reason I have two is that this is my second reconstruction. Hopefully you will only need one operation!
Removing the drains is a peculiar and nauseating feeling, and the site will sting and bleed after it happens. This is another of my least favourite parts of the process, but it will be over quickly! You're probably best off not watching it happening, and distracting yourself in some way. I, for example, played Pokemon on my gameboy while it was being removed. You may shake a bit afterwards - this is a perfectly normal reaction, and one which happens due to the shock of the drain tube removal.
After this, you will have tubigrip placed over the knee (or knees in my case). This will compress the knee and help with swelling. As you can see in the picture below, my drain sites leaked a bit of blood onto the tubigrip. Don't worry if this happens! It doesn't look great, but it's perfectly common and didn't even hurt especially. Also, feel free to appreciate that in the below photo, I have just been raising and icing my knees on a huge toy panda. Heck yesss :)
So, now to the stuff which will constitute the majority of the rest of my posts; swelling and mobility.
Swelling:
You would think that the swelling the day after the operation would be awful, and perhaps it was for me last time, although I can't remember. But as you can see in the below comparison between my legs before and after this operation, the swelling actually isn't particularly bad! It remains to be seen if it blows up a bit more over the next few days, but for now, not too shabby. The after photo was taken late at night after returning home, so this was quite some time after the operation. Sorry for all the blood in the photo, by the way, haha.
Mobility:
Okay, so this is a bit of an odd one. This time round, my mobility is actually pretty darned good. Before being discharged you should be talked through a series of little exercises you will need to do over the next few weeks to regain mobility in your knee. I sort of flew through these and the doctor was quite impressed. I also managed to walk out of the hospital without crutches or a wheelchair. Please understand that this will not always be the case! I prepared very well for my surgery by strengthening my knees, and I am also quite young. I think that for these reasons, my pain levels and mobility are fairly exceptional. You may be quite a lot sorer and may require crutches or a wheelchair. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong with your surgery or that you are weak. Every knee recovers differently, and it is vital that you do not push yourself to do things that hurt very badly, because you risk re-injuring the knee.
Sleeping:
You will probably be prescribed some pain medication before being discharged. It's not a bad idea to get this prescription filled before the day is out, as you will likely find sleep difficult without some pain relief. Try icing and elevating your leg immediately before trying to go to sleep, and take your pain medication about half an hour before. You may be woken up due to pain over the course of the night - if it enough to prevent you getting back to sleep, try icing and elevating the knee again, and if it's still hurting too much after that, take the pain medication again as long as an appropriate amount of time has passed since your last dosage. Sleeping will be uncomfortable for some time after the operation, unfortunately, and you may find sleeping in your normal position too painful. Sadly, there's not much you can do about it other than ice, elevate and medicate, then wait for time to do its thing. If you're having really bad issues, contact your surgeon for more advice.
I hope you have a pleasant first day home! Best of luck, as always :)
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