Hip replacement report
Jan. 30th, 2024 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantFandom's young but all of us are getting older, so maybe my experiences would be of use to someone?
The short version: I'm 41 days post surgery. Back at work, hardly ever in pain but still lacking in stamina, have a lot of bad muscle habits to break and a lot of strength to recover. The worst part was that it took a month before I started getting a good night's sleep again. Technology is amazing.
Background:
Seven years ago I was in yoga class doing some kind of hip opener pose, and in my right inner thigh I felt a very painful *sproing.*
I went to the doctor, and she tentatively identified it as groin tendinitis, and prescribed physical therapy. The PT was god-awful -- she was working with six patients at the same time: "Here, keep doing this exercise, and I'll be back in ten minutes." So I stopped going, and instead started working with a "yoga therapist" (maybe more like a personal trainer?) whom I'd worked with before on plantar fascitis. And she was terrific; I probably owe it to her that I retained good balance and reasonable flexibility and got back on my feet so quickly; but the one thing she lacked was the ability to order medical tests.
So I spent those seven years working to correct a tendinitis issue that I actually didn't have, and then in September I went to my (new) doctor and said, "Hey, this is getting worse instead of better," and she said, "I watched you walk in. Let's get you a hip x-ray," and the next time I turned around, I had a hip replacement surgery scheduled.
(I notice this whole thing reads like the spouse doesn't exist! He exists, he just lives an hour away and has noplace to sleep in my tiny apartment. However, the young assistant of the hospital PT was very excited to learn where he lives, because there's a restaurant in that little tiny town that she and her parents just adore.)
Pre-surgery:
A while before surgery, you have to stop taking any painkiller that actually works. That sucks.
I had a lot of repetitions of a conversation that went:
Them, in a grim tone: I hear you're going to have surgery. I hope it's nothing serious.
Me: Hip replacement.
Them, in a very happy tone: Oh! That's great!
Things I did that I recommend:
- Took the kidlet with me to take notes at appointments with the surgeon. Man, it's a luxury to have your own scribe.
- They gave me a book with exercises in it, and thanks to yoga therapy I already had a "do your PT exercises 3 times a day" habit, so I started doing them right away, to the extent that I could. Also took the book to my yoga therapist, who walked through the exercises with me, corrected my technique, and made suggestions. Most of the suggestions were "do it slower."
- I started taking the stool softener a couple of weeks before the surgery.
Things I did that I do not recommend:
- Seven years is long enough to lose quite a lot of strength on the painful side, and build up quite a lot of bad habits on the other side. I wish, when I dropped out of PT, that I'd put a note on my calendar maybe a year out that said, "If your pain isn't significantly better, make another doctor's appointment."
Incidentally:
At the first surgery prep appointment, the surgeon's nurse had a tattoo on her forearm with that reversible script design: "I'm Fine" from my perspective, "Save Me" from hers.
Surgery and hospital recovery:
I was told that they usually do surgery in the morning and send you home in the evening (partly to save money, I'd think, and partly to reduce the risk of contact with one of those hospital super-viruses) but I live in a second-floor apartment and I was very woozy at the normal discharge time, so I spent the night and went home next day at lunchtime.
Things I did that I recommend:
- Evidently you have to *ask* for ice packs and water to drink, and often for pain meds too. I asked for them every time I woke up.
- This is the second time I've had general anesthesia, and both times I had the shakes like you wouldn't believe as I came out of it. This time (eventually, after having five blankets piled on me) it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't cold, just shaky, and I started waving my arms in the air and trying to move around as much as I could, and they cleared right up.
Incidentally:
Taking all the people that the kidlet and I talked to at the hospital as a whole, I think they were fairly evenly divided between Handles a 'They' Pronoun Without Difficulty, Decides This Is A Daughter, and Decides This Is A Son.
I received anesthesia from a quartet of characters who could have come from Millennial Shakespeare: Colin and Isaiah and Sarah and Darcy, all talking loudly to be heard over a playlist of pop Christmas music. They treated me to a sort of four-way stream-of-consciousness about the many faults of the hospital's voice-activated call system (Isaiah: "And anyway I can't use it to call Colin because I don't think anybody ever told me his last name") and bees and wasps (Isaiah: "I mean yeah they're great for food and stuff but they're gonna sting you just to be a bitch?").
Home recovery:
I wasn't nauseated but at first I was cautious, and had very little appetite, and was mostly eating out of duty because I was taking so many drugs. Eventually eating proceeded in the form of weird strong cravings.
First: I wasn't aware of my mouth being dry, but I couldn't bear to eat anything that wasn't wet. (Wouldn't you think a bowl of cereal would be wet? It wasn't, unless I drank a glass of water with it.) Life saver: apple slices. It wasn't really that they tasted good, but they were reliably, comfortingly palatable. At one point I ate half an apple, left the other half on the nightstand for eight hours, knocked them on the floor, and in the middle of the night said, "I don't care, I have to have them," and picked them up again and ate them, cat hair and all.
Second: I will die if I don't have a bowl of plain white rice.
Third: I will die if I don't have a slice of deli turkey.
Fourth: OMG, please go to the grocery and buy me all the Thanksgiving-style turkey frozen dinners you can find. Buy me the ones that are marketed to men, please.
Even now, more than a month later, when my eating is fairly normal, I'm still wanting tuna five days a week.
Recovery:
At first certain leg movements would give me what I described in my journal as "intense unbelievable tearing pain." Lasted about four days.
First week I slept from pain pill to pain pill. At the end of the week I decided I didn't hurt all that much except when I was exercising, and it might be nice to be awake from time to time, so I switched from Oxycodone to Tylenol.
The only home health aids that were really useful were:
- Walker; I used it for less than a week, but for those first few days it was necessary
- Cane; I used it all the time for maybe two weeks, and then for stairs and unfamiliar terrain like doctors' offices, and now I'm still taking it with me but only because it's slushy and icy outside
- Toilet riser; I'd probably be fine without it by now but what on earth do you do with it? It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that anybody would want after it had been used, no matter how carefully I cleaned
- Yoga strap; I would hook it over my foot so I could use my hands to lift my leg onto the bed for the first week or so
- Massage ball; my glutes were so sore OMG, and it was so helpful
- Microwaveable heat packs; good to sit on for sore glutes and backs of thighs
- Refreezable ice packs; I used those on the incision for a couple of weeks until it stopped swelling
Little over a week before I felt comfortable going back to taking showers. (Kidlet bought me a bath chair, and that's how we learned that our bathroom is sized for mice; the chair not only wouldn't fit in the tub but would barely fit in the floor space. But because it's so small, I could have one hand on the shower wall and the other hand out of the shower and on the sink)
There was a period about ten days out when I had enough energy to *want* to do things but not enough energy to do them. That was depressing.
Eleven days out: could get on the floor as long as I had two chairs and a yoga block to use to get back up again. Whole new ways of stretching opened up for me. That was the point when I had the energy to vacuum the apartment -- cane in one hand, vacuum wand in the other. I had to spread the job out over two days. And this is a very small apartment.
Doctors apparently don't order physical therapy after hip replacement unless you ask them to? I asked them to, and started in two weeks out. It's been great.
Took three weeks for excretion to go back to normal. Three weeks for my pleasure in sweets to return.
My sleep was messed up for four weeks, almost to the day. I had trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and then pain would wake me up and nothing made it better except to walk up and down the hallway like my own ghost. The pain faded pretty quickly; the lack of sleep was really the worst part. In looking back over my journals to write this entry, I discovered that I had been told this would happen and had been told it would last *two* months, so I guess I got lucky.
A couple of days after I started sleeping again, I started back to work part-time, so I had about a month off, followed by one week of 8-noon and another week of 8-3. I'm on full time again starting this week.
So! I have an incision about two and a half inches long on my upper thigh, in a spot where it will show when I wear a swimsuit but shorts will hide it. I can cut my own toenails again. I can sit cross-legged on the floor, as long as I have a block and a blanket to help me get into position.
Today (41 days after surgery) I went to walk in the mall, but only had the energy to go half the distance. (It's a small mall. But my snow boots are heavy.) It was the first time since surgery that I had left the apartment for anything but medical appointments.
If anybody wants advice or a used but thoroughly cleaned toilet riser, talk to me.
The short version: I'm 41 days post surgery. Back at work, hardly ever in pain but still lacking in stamina, have a lot of bad muscle habits to break and a lot of strength to recover. The worst part was that it took a month before I started getting a good night's sleep again. Technology is amazing.
Background:
Seven years ago I was in yoga class doing some kind of hip opener pose, and in my right inner thigh I felt a very painful *sproing.*
I went to the doctor, and she tentatively identified it as groin tendinitis, and prescribed physical therapy. The PT was god-awful -- she was working with six patients at the same time: "Here, keep doing this exercise, and I'll be back in ten minutes." So I stopped going, and instead started working with a "yoga therapist" (maybe more like a personal trainer?) whom I'd worked with before on plantar fascitis. And she was terrific; I probably owe it to her that I retained good balance and reasonable flexibility and got back on my feet so quickly; but the one thing she lacked was the ability to order medical tests.
So I spent those seven years working to correct a tendinitis issue that I actually didn't have, and then in September I went to my (new) doctor and said, "Hey, this is getting worse instead of better," and she said, "I watched you walk in. Let's get you a hip x-ray," and the next time I turned around, I had a hip replacement surgery scheduled.
(I notice this whole thing reads like the spouse doesn't exist! He exists, he just lives an hour away and has noplace to sleep in my tiny apartment. However, the young assistant of the hospital PT was very excited to learn where he lives, because there's a restaurant in that little tiny town that she and her parents just adore.)
Pre-surgery:
A while before surgery, you have to stop taking any painkiller that actually works. That sucks.
I had a lot of repetitions of a conversation that went:
Them, in a grim tone: I hear you're going to have surgery. I hope it's nothing serious.
Me: Hip replacement.
Them, in a very happy tone: Oh! That's great!
Things I did that I recommend:
- Took the kidlet with me to take notes at appointments with the surgeon. Man, it's a luxury to have your own scribe.
- They gave me a book with exercises in it, and thanks to yoga therapy I already had a "do your PT exercises 3 times a day" habit, so I started doing them right away, to the extent that I could. Also took the book to my yoga therapist, who walked through the exercises with me, corrected my technique, and made suggestions. Most of the suggestions were "do it slower."
- I started taking the stool softener a couple of weeks before the surgery.
Things I did that I do not recommend:
- Seven years is long enough to lose quite a lot of strength on the painful side, and build up quite a lot of bad habits on the other side. I wish, when I dropped out of PT, that I'd put a note on my calendar maybe a year out that said, "If your pain isn't significantly better, make another doctor's appointment."
Incidentally:
At the first surgery prep appointment, the surgeon's nurse had a tattoo on her forearm with that reversible script design: "I'm Fine" from my perspective, "Save Me" from hers.
Surgery and hospital recovery:
I was told that they usually do surgery in the morning and send you home in the evening (partly to save money, I'd think, and partly to reduce the risk of contact with one of those hospital super-viruses) but I live in a second-floor apartment and I was very woozy at the normal discharge time, so I spent the night and went home next day at lunchtime.
Things I did that I recommend:
- Evidently you have to *ask* for ice packs and water to drink, and often for pain meds too. I asked for them every time I woke up.
- This is the second time I've had general anesthesia, and both times I had the shakes like you wouldn't believe as I came out of it. This time (eventually, after having five blankets piled on me) it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't cold, just shaky, and I started waving my arms in the air and trying to move around as much as I could, and they cleared right up.
Incidentally:
Taking all the people that the kidlet and I talked to at the hospital as a whole, I think they were fairly evenly divided between Handles a 'They' Pronoun Without Difficulty, Decides This Is A Daughter, and Decides This Is A Son.
I received anesthesia from a quartet of characters who could have come from Millennial Shakespeare: Colin and Isaiah and Sarah and Darcy, all talking loudly to be heard over a playlist of pop Christmas music. They treated me to a sort of four-way stream-of-consciousness about the many faults of the hospital's voice-activated call system (Isaiah: "And anyway I can't use it to call Colin because I don't think anybody ever told me his last name") and bees and wasps (Isaiah: "I mean yeah they're great for food and stuff but they're gonna sting you just to be a bitch?").
Home recovery:
I wasn't nauseated but at first I was cautious, and had very little appetite, and was mostly eating out of duty because I was taking so many drugs. Eventually eating proceeded in the form of weird strong cravings.
First: I wasn't aware of my mouth being dry, but I couldn't bear to eat anything that wasn't wet. (Wouldn't you think a bowl of cereal would be wet? It wasn't, unless I drank a glass of water with it.) Life saver: apple slices. It wasn't really that they tasted good, but they were reliably, comfortingly palatable. At one point I ate half an apple, left the other half on the nightstand for eight hours, knocked them on the floor, and in the middle of the night said, "I don't care, I have to have them," and picked them up again and ate them, cat hair and all.
Second: I will die if I don't have a bowl of plain white rice.
Third: I will die if I don't have a slice of deli turkey.
Fourth: OMG, please go to the grocery and buy me all the Thanksgiving-style turkey frozen dinners you can find. Buy me the ones that are marketed to men, please.
Even now, more than a month later, when my eating is fairly normal, I'm still wanting tuna five days a week.
Recovery:
At first certain leg movements would give me what I described in my journal as "intense unbelievable tearing pain." Lasted about four days.
First week I slept from pain pill to pain pill. At the end of the week I decided I didn't hurt all that much except when I was exercising, and it might be nice to be awake from time to time, so I switched from Oxycodone to Tylenol.
The only home health aids that were really useful were:
- Walker; I used it for less than a week, but for those first few days it was necessary
- Cane; I used it all the time for maybe two weeks, and then for stairs and unfamiliar terrain like doctors' offices, and now I'm still taking it with me but only because it's slushy and icy outside
- Toilet riser; I'd probably be fine without it by now but what on earth do you do with it? It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that anybody would want after it had been used, no matter how carefully I cleaned
- Yoga strap; I would hook it over my foot so I could use my hands to lift my leg onto the bed for the first week or so
- Massage ball; my glutes were so sore OMG, and it was so helpful
- Microwaveable heat packs; good to sit on for sore glutes and backs of thighs
- Refreezable ice packs; I used those on the incision for a couple of weeks until it stopped swelling
Little over a week before I felt comfortable going back to taking showers. (Kidlet bought me a bath chair, and that's how we learned that our bathroom is sized for mice; the chair not only wouldn't fit in the tub but would barely fit in the floor space. But because it's so small, I could have one hand on the shower wall and the other hand out of the shower and on the sink)
There was a period about ten days out when I had enough energy to *want* to do things but not enough energy to do them. That was depressing.
Eleven days out: could get on the floor as long as I had two chairs and a yoga block to use to get back up again. Whole new ways of stretching opened up for me. That was the point when I had the energy to vacuum the apartment -- cane in one hand, vacuum wand in the other. I had to spread the job out over two days. And this is a very small apartment.
Doctors apparently don't order physical therapy after hip replacement unless you ask them to? I asked them to, and started in two weeks out. It's been great.
Took three weeks for excretion to go back to normal. Three weeks for my pleasure in sweets to return.
My sleep was messed up for four weeks, almost to the day. I had trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and then pain would wake me up and nothing made it better except to walk up and down the hallway like my own ghost. The pain faded pretty quickly; the lack of sleep was really the worst part. In looking back over my journals to write this entry, I discovered that I had been told this would happen and had been told it would last *two* months, so I guess I got lucky.
A couple of days after I started sleeping again, I started back to work part-time, so I had about a month off, followed by one week of 8-noon and another week of 8-3. I'm on full time again starting this week.
So! I have an incision about two and a half inches long on my upper thigh, in a spot where it will show when I wear a swimsuit but shorts will hide it. I can cut my own toenails again. I can sit cross-legged on the floor, as long as I have a block and a blanket to help me get into position.
Today (41 days after surgery) I went to walk in the mall, but only had the energy to go half the distance. (It's a small mall. But my snow boots are heavy.) It was the first time since surgery that I had left the apartment for anything but medical appointments.
If anybody wants advice or a used but thoroughly cleaned toilet riser, talk to me.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 04:59 am (UTC)Glad you are doing better!
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 05:21 am (UTC)Good luck!
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 05:35 am (UTC)Now that I'm on the other side of 40 I've noticed if I injury myself I don't recover as fast as I used to and I'm trying my best to stay active and flexible.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 02:54 pm (UTC)One time the spouse ran into an elderly acquaintance at the gym and asked him if he was there for PT. He said, "No, a lot of my friends have started having surgery and I figured I'd just do the rehab now."
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 08:20 pm (UTC)I walk about 3 miles every day but I don't really push myself as much as I probably should and for the past two weeks with the extremely cold temperatures in Anchorage I've been using the stair stepper for 15 minutes instead.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 05:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 05:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 07:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 09:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 10:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 01:12 pm (UTC)I'm glad it went so well and concur with you and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
misbegotten about muscle habits - mine was when I was having all my TMJ Fun Time and I had to learn to rest my cheekbone on the heel of my hand, rather than my chin, because doing the latter was Fucking Up My Jaw but good. I hope your recovery continues swimmingly!
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 05:07 pm (UTC)Other people's jaws are Less Fucked Up than mine! If you don't have TMJ issues I don't see any reason you shouldn't put the weight of your head on your chin rather than your cheekbone or some other non-jointed part. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 01:21 pm (UTC)I hope your surgeon's office is telling you how fantastic a patient you are. You've done all the things they've asked you to and more! Thank you for being so careful with yourself, even when it hurts!
Also that sounds like an amazing tattoo.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 01:42 pm (UTC)And thanks for sharing all of this. Really fascinating and potentially useful.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 02:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 04:13 pm (UTC)I've been seeing a PT to try to get some more motion back into the hip I sprained as a kid, and correct the gait issues I've gotten from compensating for it. It's been an odd experience doing PT for something that's not currently causing pain--one of those things that shouldn't be a luxury, but is.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 05:13 pm (UTC)Glad you're doing well! Thanks for sharing this with us.
(no subject)
Date: 1/31/24 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/1/24 02:56 am (UTC)Thank you for all this info. My hips are okay at the moment (touch wood), but I did just get diagnosed with osteoarthritis in both knees, and Dad had both his knees replaced, so... could be a thing in my future.
(no subject)
Date: 2/1/24 04:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/1/24 09:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/2/24 02:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/2/24 05:14 pm (UTC)Mayo Clinic website says "metal, ceramic, and very hard plastic," which was news to me. I knew there was metal involved because the surgeon warned me it would show up on airport scans.
(no subject)
Date: 2/2/24 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/2/24 08:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2/3/24 06:23 am (UTC)Congratulations on preparing and surviving surgery
Date: 2/4/24 05:33 pm (UTC)and thanks so much for this detailed write-up.
Sleep disruption is so, so impairing.
(no subject)
Date: 2/11/24 05:32 am (UTC)