After surgery
The 90-day recovery: what the brochure doesn’t say
Every surgery packet shows the same smooth upward curve. Real recovery is a sawtooth: two steps forward, one back, with a famously discouraging stretch around week two to three when the early adrenaline is gone, the swelling isn’t, and progress feels stalled. Knowing the sawtooth is normal is half the battle.
The honest arc
- Days 1–14: pain management, swelling control, wound care, first PT. Small wins count: standing longer, sleeping better, needing less medication than yesterday.
- Weeks 2–6: the grind. This is where discouragement peaks and where milestone tracking matters most — pain trend (not pain today), range of motion, walking distance.
- Weeks 6–12: function returns in jumps: stairs, car, errands, work. The 90-day mark is a checkpoint, not a finish line — improvement continues for months after.
Track milestones, not moods
On any single hard day, recovery feels broken. Across a tracked week, it’s almost always moving. That’s why we built a private recovery dashboard — your dates, stage, and checklist, stored on your own device — and why remote tracking with your care team, where offered, is worth saying yes to: it means someone is actually watching the trend between visits.
Call 911 now for sudden shortness of breath or sudden chest pain: these can mean a blood clot has reached the lung.
Call your surgeon the same day for: a persistent fever higher than 100°F, chills, increasing (not decreasing) pain, new calf pain, tenderness or swelling, or wound redness or drainage that spreads. The 24-hour rule: significantly worse than yesterday, unexplained — call.
Warning signs as listed by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons: OrthoInfo, total knee replacement and total hip replacement.
Open my private recovery dashboard →
Call your surgeon the same day for: a persistent fever higher than 100°F, chills, increasing (not decreasing) pain, new calf pain, tenderness or swelling, or wound redness or drainage that spreads. The 24-hour rule: significantly worse than yesterday, unexplained — call.
Warning signs as listed by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons: OrthoInfo, total knee replacement and total hip replacement.