So you think you should be further along… maybe you’re not even six weeks out, or you’ve just hit that two-month mark, and you’re wondering why you still don’t feel “normal.”
Let me tell you something: you are not back to normal—or anywhere close to it—in six weeks.
And I say that as someone who’s been through not one, but two knee replacements and with all the love I can muster. When my surgeon told me, “I’ll see you in a year,” I swear it felt like the floor had been pulled out from under me. A year? I was thinking maybe three months tops.
But that’s the thing about recovery—it humbles you. It teaches you patience in ways you didn’t realize you were signing up for.
Last year, we were supposed to fly out to Las Vegas to meet friends for the weekend. Our flight kept getting delayed… and then finally canceled. Suddenly, we were scrambling. Hotel accommodations had to be fixed, we weren’t sure if we were even going anymore, and everything felt up in the air.
That same feeling showed up in my first knee replacement adventure, six years ago.
Before I go into that, if you’re new here and still preparing for your knee replacement
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One thing that helped me wrap my head around knee replacement recovery was comparing it to something I already understood. I’d never faced a major surgery before, so I started leaning on analogies. Oddly enough, one of the most helpful was thinking of recovery like a vacation.Think about it: when traveling, people can help you along the way—family may drop you at the airport, the flight attendant hands you a drink, and the hotel staff checks you in.
But at the end of the day, it’s still your ID that gets scanned, your bag that gets weighed, your stomach that has to process the food to keep you going. Healing after knee replacement works the same way. You may have family, friends or neighbors cheering you on, but it’s still your body, your strength, your healing that carries you forward.
That’s why I leaned hard on analogies—things I had done before that felt familiar. One of the strangest but most helpful ones? A vacation.Think about it. When you travel, people can help you along the way, but at the end of the day it’s your ID that gets checked, your bag that gets weighed, your stomach that processes food to keep you going. Recovery is the same. You may have family, friends or neighbors cheering you on, but it’s still your body, your strength, your healing that carries you forward.
The more I sat with that, the more it made sense. Vacations don’t always go smoothly.
You’ve probably had a trip where something went sideways—a delayed flight, a lost reservation, or weather that canceled your plans. But you figured it out. You adjusted, you pivoted, and in the end, you still made memories.
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When you’re recovering from a knee replacement, it’s so easy to feel like your knee is the center of the universe. Every step, every stretch, every PT session revolves around it. I remember getting caught in that heaviness myself, until gratitude gave me a way to zoom out.
Gratitude didn’t erase the hard stuff, but it helped me notice the good tucked into the process.
Let me share a few examples.
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