At the 2 week mark it was ‘staple’ removal day! I call it that because the first time around I was told that I had staples and was given a staple removal tool and arranged my family doctor appointment to have them pulled out. However, when I attended my family doctor’s office, they removed my bandage, the steri-strips and advised that there were no staples… okay, so what’s going on? What they had done was stitch me up with dissolvable stitches and then use the steri-strips to keep it all close and together. And since my boyfriend, mom and myself didn’t really know what we were looking at a week earlier when we changed the bandage we were all surprised!
This time around I knew for sure there weren’t any staples. However, I still made my 2 week appointment with my family doctor. I still wanted her to remove the steri-strips and ensure everything looked good. And it did! She removed roughly 22 steri-strips, including the 1 on the ‘rod’ stitch at the top of my hip bone. Removal of steri-strips don’t really hurt, sometimes there can be a little pull or something, but that is it.
What hurt was the cleaning up of the knots! Last time I learned that leaving the knots at either end of your incision can cause a lot of annoyance and pain if it rubs or catches on something (like clothing, etc.). My family doctor cut out two knots at the small incision at the top of my hip bone (as they often caught on things last time and actually hurt quit a bit). So while the removal was a little painful it was short lived and necessary.
Side Note: the knots could be cut out because the incision was healed enough that nothing was going to open back up. We weren’t just cutting things open for fun.
In relation to being told I had staples (and I didn’t), I later learned that they normally use staples for hip replacements at the hospital I went too but they wanted to try to minimize the scar since I was so young. I’m not sure if it would have made a huge difference but whatever they did it has healed up really nicely both times!
Right Hip
Left Hip
