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Knee Swelling After Surgery
featuring Lisa Alarcon
Knee Swelling After Surgery
Let’s talk about swelling, the fluid, that occurs in the knee. What it’s composed of depends on how long it’s been there. The longer the swelling is in the knee, the tougher it can be, the more “fibrotic.” if you’ve ever noticed, you can push on someone’s skin and it stays dipped. Those patients have a lot more protein in that fluid, and so what happens as you get that fluid. the joint has a structure that supports it, called the joint capsule. And it’s like a balloon when there is swelling inside.
The Knee Can Be Like a Balloon
The more swelling that’s in that knee, the tighter the balloon gets. Once that balloon gets too tight, you have a significant limit in how much you can move your knee.
When that happens, you don’t move your knee because it hurts, it’s uncomfortable, so you keep it still.
Keeping it still only creates kind of this vicious cycle of now it doesn’t move, so I can have scar tissue start to set up.
Swelling and Knee Movement
Any time you put a joint, and as you get older, as we all do, you put your body in a certain position and then you start to move out of that position, and everything’s like, “Oh, wait a minute. That doesn’t feel so good.”
And that’s also what’s happening in a fresh knee joint, especially immediately following surgery. Those structures are not happy that they’ve been disturbed.
They like to be where they are, they don’t want to be cut, and that has all happened. And so the body’s natural system says, “I’m going to limit how much motion I want this knee to have, and so I’m going to send this swelling in.”
The X10 Meta-Blog
We call it a “Meta-Blog.” We step back and give you a broad perspective on all aspects of knee health as with this article on Knee Swelling After Surgery.
In this one-of-a-kind blog we gather together great thinkers, doers, and writers. All our work is related to Knee Surgery, Recovery, Preparation, Care, Success and Failure. Meet physical therapists, coaches, surgeons, patients, and as many smart people as we can gather to create useful articles for you. This is for you if you have a surgery upcoming, or in the rear-view mirror. Or maybe you just want to take care of your knees to avoid surgery. Executive Editor: PJ Ewing
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