Risks of Waiting for Your Knee Replacement
Risks of Waiting for Your Knee Replacement
Wait times have went up drastically over the years for knee replacements. This has left thousands of Canadians at sea on their own as they wait to get a surgery date. This can create major consequences if you experience long delays. Let’s look at some reasons how waiting can make things worse:
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Mental health
– Let’s face it, winter months in Canada can be long. Seasonal affect disorder (SAD) is a real thing and very well known to many. If you have an ailment that causes stress or continued pain, it can create and/or exacerbate SAD making you have low energy, poor mood and cause you to sleep too much. Worse yet, it can turn into a full blown depression. Feeling discouraged, hopeless or in constant pain affects your focus, ability to function and can hamper your social interactions with people. Not being able to play with your children or grandchildren, staying home from parties, or not being able to work can all create more stress on your mental health. When your mental health decreases, your whole body reacts to the stress. This can make your pain unbearable, therefore, too difficult to maintain a healthy physical health.
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Physical health
– Regular exercise is important to maintain strong bones, muscle strength, better sleep and more energy. It improves your mood and overall good health. Obesity can put limitations on whether or not they can do surgery on you. It’s a double edge sword. You are in so much pain that you cannot do regular exercise, therefore, you put weight on. However, if your BMI is too high, you may not qualify for private knee surgery. As your weight increases into an unhealthy range, you could also develop high blood pressure or diabetes, which further complicates a surgery. If you are not mobile due to excessive pain, there are still ways to get exercise in without exacerbating your issue or creating more pain. For instance, if it is too painful to walk due to your hip, try swimming or doing sitting exercises with light weights. *Always talk to your doctor or physiotherapist first though on what is the safest for you. If you keep your physical fitness up, your recovery will go much smoother and quicker. If you are not physically fit, be prepared for a much longer road to recovery.
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More risk to further injury
– Waiting a couple months to have an already known injury that needs surgery is probably not going to hamper your situation in the grand scheme of things. Having to wait several months, a year, and in some cases 2 years, can. As we indicated above, physical health is crucial to having a safe and successful surgery. The longer you wait, the harder it is to exercise to your full potential. Inactivity will lead to muscle loss and increased stiffness to your joint. This in turn will make it harder and harder to walk putting more stress on the joint by not having the muscles surrounding it to support things. This can create even more issues such as making a joint deformity worse or cause injuries to other joints and/or body parts as they over compensate for the weight you can no longer support.
Like most things, this is not an end all. You do have options. The quickest way to get your knee surgery is to go the private manner. Health Vantis works with many facilities that can offer you a private knee replacement without waiting months on end to get a surgery date that might be even another year down the road. Contact us at info@healthvantis.com or 877-344-3544 for more details to how we can help you.
Health Vantis
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