Hip or knee replacement surgery is rarely an emergency. Take the time to prepare your home before you go to the hospital. The preparations you make before can speed your recovery after the surgery and reduce your stress levels while you recuperate.
Walk around your home and look for potential problems. Push a chair in front of you to help you identify risky areas. Remember you won't be picking up your feet as briskly as you do now.
Your want to consider two factors: safety and convenience.
- Remove throw rugs and small items from the floor.
- Tape down electrical cords and wires.
- Rearrange furniture to make wider pathways that can accommodate a wheel chair, walker or crutches
- Set up a bedroom downstairs for yourself. Climbing up and down stairs is a skill you may have to re-learn.
- Make sure the things you use frequently are on lower shelves and within arms reach.
- Get a long handled grabbing device to help you get things off higher shelves
- Make sure stairs have hand rails
- If you don't have a walk-in shower consider installing grab bars in the bathtub
- Buy an elevated toilet seat and have it installed
- Set up your recovery area. Prepare the place you will spend the most time with an appropriate chair, a phone, TV and remote control, glasses and reading materials.
- Get a carpenter's apron or a large canvas shoulder bag to help carry things around the house
- If you have to make your own meals prepare a supply of frozen casseroles, soups or other easy to prepare foods, especially those you can make in a microwave
- Plan ahead if you need transportation to doctor's or the grocery store. Remember, with your new hip or knee you will be more able to help someone else, so don't be afraid to ask friends, neighbors and family to help.
Enjoy your new hip or knee and the pain free experience it will bring you.
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