Dear LPG, 

I live with my mother who has recently had the second of her knees replaced and there is no doubt about it, being with her and seeing what she is going through has taught me that it is a truly painful business for the first three months or so.

She is now, for the second time, going through the bit where there is nothing but pain and she is convinced that this leg has resulted in far more swelling than the last, but I have made sure that she has something to measure her present symptoms with.

About three years ago, when she had the first one done, I helped her to make a visual diary of her stages of recovery which has given her something to measure her progress with this second operation by. 

Each time I visited her in hospital, I used my smart phone to take a picture of both her knees (so that she could not only see the swelling as it went down (we photographed both so that we also would have an idea about how much bigger than normal it was) and, when she went home, as the days went by we also made a little diary regularly where she said what was hurting and mentioned any other symptoms that were affecting her.  Being able to look back at the short videos really gave a flavour of how she progressed the first time and, it has provided us with a good way of charting her current progress. 

I find that perhaps one of the most important things that comparing her progress with the pictures and videos from the first time has given her, is something else to do with those many days that she has had to spend at home, in pain and feeling totally dependent on the people around her, and we are repeating the videos with this second knee.

Getting the videos and pictures just right is a time consuming exercise, much like the many physical exercises that have to be done after such an operation in order to get her knee working again, and time is one thing that the patient has loads of. This, to me, was one of the most important objects of taking the pictures to start with.  I am sure it does not happen to all patients but during a period of recovering after any operation, boredom can lead to depression and anything that takes up some of the time in the day at that stage can be a good thing. I also found that all she wanted to talk about was her symptoms and having pictures of the last time allowed us to be able to talk about it without always referring to how bad it all was right at that moment.

I have no doubt that it is not something that everyone would want to take on but actually making the videos, taking the pictures and looking back at them, will give some patients something else to do while they are recovering from any operation.

JW, Charlton