Decompression Recovery

I'll be blunt: recovery from the core decompression surgery sucked pretty hard.

I wasn't allowed to put any weight whatsoever on my left leg for six weeks. The rationale here is that, just as it sounds, the core of the bone in my left femur had been drilled and the bone wasn't stable enough to support my weight. That was fine for the first few days since I was in a drug-induced stupor and mostly stayed in bed or on the couch. But the next five-and-a-half weeks wasn't fun. I had to work, play, and live on crutches for a month and half, always being careful not to put any weight on my left leg.

I had an unfortunate occurrence about a week into my recovery. My wife and I decided to venture out for a night out for the first time since my surgery. As I was crutching along into a movie theater, I stumbled and accidentally put all of my weight on my left leg for about a second. The pain was pretty intense, and I was concerned I'd caused additional harm to my femur. We went home, I took a Percocet, and all was right with the world for 4-6 hours. I had some additional pain for another few days from that accident.

I wasn't prescribed physical therapy after my core decompression, so really all I had to do was avoid putting weight on my left leg. After six weeks, I was back to walking normally, ellipting, etc. My surgeon and I were cautiously optimistic that the surgery had successfully stemmed the advancement of the avascular necrosis. And, (spoiler alert), it had. But, lucky me, you'll recall that I had two issues in my hip: avascular necrosis and osteoarthritis. And the the osteoarthritis in the joint was about to come on hard.