Oh man, crazy news today. Two weeks ago I had multiple doctors tell me it wasn't a question of if I was allergic to my implant, but which metal in particular. Today I was told I have no metal allergies. VERY good news. This means no second knee surgery.
If anyone is curious, here's the operating theory on what the problem was. Warning, it's kinda gross.
Over the last week I've been doing patch and prick testing to figure out the problem. They narrowed it down to about 8 compounds that I'm allergic to. Some common stuff found in lots of soaps, shampoos, lotions, etc. and another found in antibiotic ointments like neosporin. Based on that info, the theory is this: After surgery my incision wasn't healing up well. I started putting neosporin on it to help it. Rash and dry skin developed over my knee and it just generally looked and felt like crap, so I started putting Aquaphor on it. I hadn't really used it in the past but it's supposed to be pretty innocuous. Soon the rash and eczema worsened and started spreading to the rest of my body. Intense itching everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Eventually a huge solid red/purple rash formed right over my knee implant and fluid started basically pouring out. I could soak a hand towel in less than an hour, easy. It was disgusting. That's when I started getting it looked at and the diagnosis of metal allergy was made by my surgeon and dermatologist (a metal allergy specialist). But in retrospect, now that we know I'm allergic to neosporin and aquaphor, it's pretty clear I had just been doing everything wrong. Aggravating one reaction with a product that gave a worse reaction and then doing it more and more and more. I thought I'd narrowed down everything. Every food, every pill. I had no idea Neosporin and/or Aquaphor could ever do something like this. Oh, and then I got a secondary skin infection because of all that. Problems upon problems. I have to go fragrance free now and avoid 99% of personal products. They gave me a list of things that are okay and were proud to tell me that one of the shampoos might actually be available in local stores. Haha! Still better than knee surgery x2 though!
Anyway, it seems to be solved now. I finally get to start a seriously huge dose of steroid that will hopefully make it stop. I haven't used either offending product in a couple weeks now but I'm still in pretty bad shape. Maybe it's from the soaps, etc. Doc says that the steroids will have me 'whistling dixie' in a few days. He and the ortho doc feel that the overall crappy heeling in my knee was also affected by this and that there is a good chance I will feel awesome once it gets cleared up. I hope I can report back here in a month or so that I finally don't regret getting my knee replaced. Fingers crossed.
