hip to be square

Reflections on a Middle-Aged Surgery

Well, hello there!

I know it’s been a bit, but I think I have a decent excuse. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks preparing to get, getting, and recovering from getting, some body parts replaced.

“Total hip arthroplasty,” is what they officially call it, and it’s just as much fun as it sounds. What it means is that last Monday I went under the knife to have the top portion of my femur sawed off and replaced with a shiny new chunk of titanium.

This week I’m spending some serious quiet time resting, relaxing and being generally bored out of my gourd in the confines of my house (or more particularly, the short path between my bed and bathroom).

my new bits n’ pieces

get a new hip, they said…

It took me a while to get here. I first started feeling aches and pains back in 2016, after a groin pull on the left side that took forever to heal. Over the years, I’ve sought out chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga therapy, massage… pretty much anything I could throw at it. Different modalities helped in different proportions, but in the end, I found myself right back in the mainstream medical system, in the office of a local Orthopedist who has the (dubious?) honor of working with several of our stellar (??) Washington DC sports teams.

“I can give you an injection for the pain,” he offered, “but eventually you’ll need a new hip.”

Not one to take the removal and replacement of body parts lightly, I did what I always do: immersed myself in reading everything I could find — particularly those iconoclasts and kooks who are on the fringe, touting alternatives. I did consults, I bought online classes, I bounced from thing to thing.

All the while, I talked to folks I know. Every time I brought it up — protesting, in due course, that at 49 I’m too young to get a hip replacement — someone would tell me about a friend, or a friend’s friend, who was even younger who’d had it done. And invariably, the verdict was the same: they were glad they did.

I still remember the words of my family physician, who said, “These days it’s really not a big deal. They just pop it out and pop a new one in.”

decision time

I finally took the plunge when a friend in an online group passed along one key question: “Is your hip making decisions for you?”

I thought about that one for a long time. Even now, scrolling back through the photos on my phone, it’s like a prehistory of my decrepitude: here a photo of the last half-marathon I ran, there a photo of the last time I went hiking with the dogs. Rowing, biking, lifting… activities abandoned as my physical world shrunk, little by little.

Last fall, I remember coming home from a Nats game with Judy. As we took the escalator from the Metro, my jaw dropped, seeing the full length of the ramp we’d have to walk to get down to the street — not to mention the mile afterward to get home. Shortly thereafter, I found myself getting in the car to travel to a meeting on the other side of campus, a distance of approximately 0.3 miles.

It was time.

pulling the trigger

So it came to be that with the start of 2024, I embarked on consultations with a few different surgeons and eventually found one who put my mind at rest.

Likely, he explained, it started in my adolescence. During my growth spurt, when my muscles and bones were growing approximately two inches a day, there were some anomalies around how the leg bone-connected to the pelvis-bone. Ever since, it’s been a “square peg in a round hole” type situation, the femur wearing away at the cartilage and just asking for a breakdown.

I set a date: April 15. Tax day. Of the event itself, there’s much to tell, and yet nothing to tell. Same with the recovery over the past two weeks. After three nights in the hospital (certainly not nothing) and some lessons on learning how to walk again, I was sent home with a shiny new walker to navigate the obstacle course that is our cluttered, two-bedroom/one-bath townhouse.

Surgery has a way of making life elemental. When did you last eat? When did you last potty? Are you keeping the foam pillow between your knees so that you don’t cross your legs?

The recovery hasn’t been the breeze that some may have led me to expect, but it hasn’t been terrible, either. It’s been my own little purgatory, of sorts. I’ve decided to think of it as a “retreat,” just because that sounds a lot better than “convalescence.”

Tomorrow I’m back at work — though my boss has been kind enough to sign off on working from home — and more PT this week, with an eye toward getting off the walker and onto my own two feet in the near future. People tell me I’m doing well, and I’ve decided it’s best to believe them.

During pre-op, my surgeon said he wouldn’t ask whether I was glad I did it until at least six weeks out. Now I see why. It hasn’t been a pleasant couple of weeks. But it is kind of amazing how much stronger the leg seems to get, day after day. A testament to the body’s ability to heal and grow. So that’s something.

On to it,

big dave