Hip! Hip! Surgery.

It finally happened! It was strange to go in with questions looming. Would he remove the hardware and my hip? Would I wake up feeling better or worse? I can say that no matter how difficult this surgery was at any given point it still beats the back surgery hands down. For starters I woke up in the recovery room, imagine that! I woke up and my vision was terribly blurred. After blinking repeatedly I touched my eyes and realized the problem was a slimy substance smeared on them. I politely asked the recovery nurse, Richard, for something to wipe them with. Once I could see I asked for ice chips and marveled at not waking up in horrible pain with a tube down my throat.

Once I had taken a moment with my glorious ice chips I inquired as to what exactly had happened. Richard told me I still had the hip I was born with, which seemed odd since I felt pretty good, but who knows how doped up I was. I was sad to leave my new friend, but anxious for answers when they moved me to a room. I never did see the doctor after it was over, but Mike told me the Ortho had opened me up to find the hardware loose! Funny since he was so worried about not being able to get it out.

Turns out when the bus hit me 7yrs ago it knocked the hardware loose. You can't see metal on an MRI (it's just glare) and X-rays are static images so there was no way to know without getting in there. All this time people were saying things about how my hip pain "was in a weird place", etc I guess the fact that it was emanating from the pins once used to hold my femur together explains that.

I was discharged from the hospital Saturday. While this admission was conspicuous lacking the daily 4am blood draws I did not escape the needles completely, in fact I may have had it worse this go round. I was prescribed blood thinner injections to be given in the stomach daily for 3weeks. Yuck-O! That hurt really bad. The poking hurts and there's an ensuing burning lasting sometimes in that neighborhood of 5minutes. After I'd been on them a few days I was cold all the time too. Apparently something like 50% of hip surgery patients get blood clots (the only joint with a higher rate is the knee).

When I finally did she that elusive Ortho a week later (the day after Thanksgiving) he said he was hopeful that loose hardware had been the cause of a significant amount of my pain. He said he examined my hip joint thoroughly and it was only mildly arthritic not dying like we thought. He wanted me to heal up and see where my pain level was before we decide when to replace the hip.