Rapid Recovery Book

Pain Management

We take your pain very serious and we will do everything we can to make your pain tolerable after your total joint replacement.

We aim to manage the discomfort so that you can eat, sleep, move around and participate in therapy. You will not be pain free, but our goal is to make your pain level tolerable.

Preoperatively we will give you analgesics, during surgery we will give you a combination of medication that will have a numbing effect in your incision area and post - operatively we will give you pain medication in your IV and pill form. We will try to transition you to oral medication 24 hours after your surgery. It is important for us to know what pain medication is going to be effective for you. We have to stop giving IV narcotics to find out what is going to control your pain at home. You will go home with a prescription for pain medication, and we need to be sure that it is the one that is going to be most beneficial to you. Ice and positioning are also helpful with pain control. You cannot use too much ice after your surgery. We recommend that you use ice for at least 20 minutes every 2 hours for the first 2 weeks after your surgery. You need to put a cloth barrier between your skin and the ice pack. Sometimes it’s helpful to get up and go for a short walk to help relieve some discomfort.

Throughout your hospital stay, we will ask you to rate your pain on a pain scale. This same pain scale will be used in the recovery room and on the nursing units. The pain scale is a tool the nurses use to judge how effective your pain is being managed.