Thirty years ago, I spent an evening chastely necking on a sofa. The next morning I woke up in searing pain that spiked and eased for the next 30 years. MRI, CT scan, a steroid injection that worked for about 15 minutes… “I feel like a doll with its leg out of the socket,” I’d announce. But nobody wrote that down.
Eventually my body and I reached a détente: I accepted that just about any activity could inflame my muscles and joints for days, and my body agreed to function the rest of the time. But in 2015, the old sharp pain returned with a vengeance. Dr. Greg Holtzman, a physical therapist at Wash. U., suggested a simple X-ray.
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Two days later, I was listening to the report in a daze: femoroacetabular impingement, pincer type. A big lump of bone prevented my leg from fitting smoothly into the hip joint, hence it couldn’t rotate normally and had been crushing the cartilage (labrum) that lines the hip socket.
Thirty years of feeling like a neurotic hypochondriac bound for the Island of Misfit Toys, made understandable in less than a minute.
My leg had been out of its socket.
“A lot of these diagnoses were missed,” Holtzman explained. “We used to think of the hip as a large and very stable joint that just sat there.”
I trotted (gingerly) off to Dr. Ryan Nunley, an orthopedic surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and scheduled a total hip replacement. A bright, shiny new ball and socket. I wanted to kayak. To wear shoes with soles that didn’t look like they’d been cut from a snow tire. To squat and pull a few dandelions without spending the rest of the weekend in bed.
I raced out and bought a cane, a picker-upper, and—the sexiest purchase of my life to date—an elevated toilet seat. I read horror stories about dislocated hips, but as it turned out, Nunley’s small incision dramatically lowered the risk. I was up a few hours after surgery, gripping a walker with white knuckles but bearing weight.
Still, it’s a graceless recovery—just getting out of bed is a hippopotamus somersault. I fumbled through the days, dropping things and tottering down the long hall to find the damned picker-upper and bring it back to pick up what I’d dropped and then dropping the picker-upper and now where was my leg-lifter? The simplest of tasks now required 23 action steps. I gave up on multitasking, or even tasking. Friends brought casseroles and walked the bemused dog. My husband did the housework and made slushy ice packs.
Finally it was time for my six-week checkup. “You,” Nunley said, “had a terrible hip.” When he lit an X-ray light box, the new joint shone brighter than anything else, perfectly symmetrical, no arthritis anywhere. The ball rested neatly in its socket.
7 Hard-Earned Hip Tips
- Flannel PJs stick to sheets; wear something silky so it’s easier to move. And a robe with deep pockets for snacks or your phone, which will invariably ring when it is farthest away from you.
- Buy the silly contraption that helps you put on socks, lest you try your spouse’s patience by sticking out cold toes and demanding that he or she scrunch on your socks.
- Use a duvet or heavy quilt instead of blankets that will tangle as you struggle to position various pillows.
- Find a well-upholstered chair, with arms, that fits your body perfectly—you’ll live in it.
- Find an inexpensive laptop cart on wheels with a top that can be easily raised, lowered, or tilted.
- Mix 1 cup of rubbing alcohol with two cups of water in a Ziploc bag, freeze it, and triple-bag it. The resulting slush will conform to your body.
- Avoid reading posts from people who are water-skiing two weeks after surgery—or still whining three years later. “Those outside the norm,” I was told, “are the people who post.”
