If you’re here because it’s the middle of the night and sleep feels impossible after your knee replacement, you’re not doing anything wrong. This is one of the most common and frustrating parts of recovery, and it’s rarely talked about in a way that actually helps.Why You Can’t Sleep After Knee Replacement Surgery
By far the biggest complaint outside of pain that I hear after a knee replacement is the inability to sleep. I had this myself for the first six weeks after my first knee replacement. The only way it seemed that I would sleep is directly after taking my pain dosage.
I would also find myself dozing throughout the day, and I often wondered if that’s what kept me from sleeping at night. But it didn’t really matter because at some point either the nerve zinging or the deep ache would get me to get out of bed for my first knee replacement. I keep telling you the difference between the number one and number two because I prioritized sleep for knee number two, and I didn’t for knee number one.
It turns out that there’s a lot of reasons for missing sleep post knee replacement, and there is one profound solution that I will share with you.
Swelling and Inflammation After Knee Replacement Can Disrupt Sleep
Swelling and inflammation is definitely the big driver for not being able to sleep post knee replacement. I found this actually goes on for many, many, many weeks after surgery, and it’s going to hang around and it’s OK. You have rest, elevation, ice and compression on your side, which helps inflammation, and it actually helped my pain for a bit.
Nerve Irritation and Night Pain After Knee Replacement
Nerve irritation is another reason that you could wake up out of a dead sleep. Nerves are mad because of the surgery itself and what happened throughout the surgery. The pain is when they start firing again, they bring drama with them.
Also, my body didn’t trust my knee. This was coming for a long while before it was replaced and followed after. It was actually part of the healing or the recovery process to gain confidence in your leg, but at night your brain is gonna kick on and just keep repeating that it doesn’t trust it.
Sleep Position Problems After Knee Replacement
One of my biggest obstacles were positioning problems. I didn’t sleep on my back before my knee surgery, and after my knee surgery, all I could do is sleep on my back. I actually just maneuvered my pelvis as often as I could to try and get into a different position.
I also think this is why I slept better on my secondary replacement than I did on my first. By my second knee replacement, I had had my first knee replacement and my first hip replacement, so I was well-versed in sleeping on my back.
Why Pain Meds Wearing Off Wake You Up at Night
Also, if you’re not setting an alarm, there’s a good chance that you’re gonna wake up when the pain medicine wears off. You can be asleep and all of a sudden, your pain meds wear off, and a half an hour after your pain meds wear off you wake up. And that is the worst feeling because now you’re playing catch-up on the pain.
Now this one happens a little further on in recovery, but I found that the more I did during the day, the less I slept at night. And that could be from overdoing it. It takes a little while to learn what your body can and doesn’t want to do while it’s recovering.
Then you have the very last one, which is your brain just will not stop making noise. And what I mean by this is that you’re gonna have thoughts in the middle of the night that will wake you up. The brain, your subconscious brain, is gonna give you all the thoughts, all the self-defeating thoughts while you are recovering. It’s gonna say that you’re going too slow. The scar tissue is building. You’re not going fast enough. And those are all untrue, my friend.
The One Thing That Actually Helps Sleep After Knee Replacement
The one solution that I have for you, and you’re not gonna like this, but I have to tell you that this is gonna give you a lot of relief when you start realizing that you really do need to sleep when your body is ready to sleep. And that’s not always through the night.
But if you’re sitting there binge watching a Netflix special or show that you absolutely love and you fall asleep for a couple hours, please have compassion for your body. Your body is doing big, big things, and you want it to be recovering on the timeline that it has for itself, and we don’t always know what that is. But friend, be rest assured that every passing moment is getting you closer to being completely healed.
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