Still in pain

I went to the doctor today due to the fact that I have been in severe pain since last Thursday!! My hip and left upper leg have kept my writhing in pain on the couch or in bed at night. The doc prescribed some stiffer px meds, thank God! She showed me X-rays of my tibia where she placed all of my proximal femur bone graft material. WOW did she pack it in!! The gap in my leg has new bone just stuffed all over inside it.

I found this info in Orthopedic Technology Review
New Frontiers in Bone Grafting

By Evelyn B. Kelly, PhD:
"...Bone grafting has come a long way since the day in 1688 when a Dutch surgeon attempted his first procedure. It has come a long way from the grafting practiced just 20 years ago. According to Joseph Lane, MD, Hospital for Special Surgery, New York, “Very few topics in orthopedic surgery have generated as much interest over the past century as bone grafts and their substitutes.” With over 5.6 million US fractures reported annually, bone is the second most frequently transplanted tissue (second only to transfused blood), and bone transplantation is essential in orthopedics.

The Gold Standard

The autologous bone graft from the patient’s own donor site is still the gold standard. Autologous bone provide the graft with living, bone-producing cells for osteogenesis. The autograft allows for osteoconduction, the process in which bone becomes a scaffold for new bone.Grafting also results in osteoinduction when mesenchymal cells around the graft are signaled to differentiate into osteoblasts, the cells responsible for new bone. The grafting procedure can be nonvascular or vascular, but the gold standard may be unmet if the amount of autologous bone needed is not available. Problems such as donor-site morbidity and graft strength, as well as cost factors, have provoked the search for other answers..."

We are praying like mad that this new graft incorporates into the tibia and starts to form new strong structural bone!! One week down and many to go!!!

These are the two kinds of grafts I have had:
# Autograft = bone from the same individual- Current graft
# Allograft = bone from another individual of the same species- Graft back in Oct 05