Let's Try This Again

Two nights ago, while I was wondering if Frankenstorm was going to take my lights, my house, or both, and I couldn't sleep owing to various things related to my hip replacement surgery, I decided to start a blog. I was posting from my Kindle Fire and apparently it didn't take. That's fine. I probably had a nice little buzz anyway, so I'm not sure what I wrote would have made much sense. What I aim to do here is to tell anyone who wants to know, just what it's like to get a new hip. I'm going to go all the way from the first pain through denial, to the decision process, to the replacement itself and the rehab, which is where I am now. In the months leading up to mine, I found snippets here and there but nothing really told me what I wanted to know: what is it like, up close and personal, to get a new hip? So here we go. I'm lucky, relatively speaking. I only had arthritis in my left hip, nowhere else. I don't have crooked fingers, achy knees, any of that. Now, how did this happen? I may go into this in more detail later, but suffice to say, I believe that my arthritis was caused by repeated stress on that particular joint in a particular way. The pain started, oh, maybe 7 years ago, and I can say honestly, that there was seldom a day, once it started, that I didn't have pain. It was a nag at first, nothing big, but I knew it was there and sometimes that first step after I stood was an adventure. I started taking two Advil every morning, prophylactically, and that did a decent job for a while. Everything works for a while, until nothing works at all. So we have pain as a given. With pain, especially if you're me, and you love to wear high heels, comes a bit of insecurity. At 50 I was still rocking 4-inch heels. The heights came down and down and down. In 2009 I went to Germany for ten days with my daughter and it was a 4-cities-in-10-days extravaganza, and my best friend was my extra-large bottle of Advil gelcaps. We took trains and public transportation and went on foot and it was painful. I remember sitting in a cafe in Berlin, looking to see if 6 hours had elapsed and I could take two more. I made it through the trip, which honestly, I didn't think I had in me, but the next year, when the other daughter wanted her own trip to Europe with Mom, I had to beg off. I couldn't have done the stairs, the trains, the general non-handicapped accessibleness of Europe again. Everything adds up. Someone, somewhere, says hip replacement and your first thought is, no, not me! but later on, when you can't get that leg comfortable, you think...yeah, maybe that could be me. In a couple of years. You start looking for parking places closer and closer and closer to the store, and you stop going to places where you cant' park in front. You look at the distance between here and there and it yawns like an expanse on the veldt. The tundra. Like you're climbing, if not Mount Everest, then at least Mount Katahdin. You can't shop because you can't stand for any period of time, and when you do shop, it's somewhere with shopping carts, which are, let's be honest, secretly walkers. That I have anything at all chic or stylish in my life at this point is owing almost entirely to the fact that Target has shopping carts. And you know what the weird thing is? You want to keep it a secret. You don't want anyone to know, except, hello, you're limping and sometimes someone doesn't realize that we're not supposed to mention that the Emperor doesn't have any clothes and asks you why. I always went with a repressive, "I have a bad hip," and since I can be very repressive, that usually stopped all conversation. I didn't want to talk about it, because I didn't know what to say. Was I going to get it replaced? Beats me. I think that there was not a time in the seven years that this pained me, that I didn't hope, at least subconsciously, that the next time I stood up, it was going to be miraculously gone. I had nothing to say. My hip hurts. I take so much Advil that I'm starting to sneak how much I take. In my spare time from being in pain and worrying about that, I worry that I'm killing myself with the Advil. And then you read articles. I read one in the aisle in the grocery store, in "Arthritis Monthly" or whatever it's called, written by a woman who was finally breaking down and getting one done. She was decidedly ambivalent, which honestly sort of puzzled me, because if you know this is happening, then go fix it. And then I read an article in "Vogue" by a woman who had it done, and I thought, hmm. Vogue. So not a lumpy old lady. Now, making this much more complex than it needed to be is the fact that I was a complete avoider of the medical profession. COMPLETE. No screenings, no checkups, no this, no that. (PLEASE do not lecture me). If I got so sick I needed antibiotics, I went to the walk in clinic. I knew, from those, that my blood pressure was high...and the one time I DID go to a doctor for my hip, I got such a lecture about neglecting my health that I forthwith stayed away from doctors for the NEXT five years. Well, it got so bad that I had no life. I finally made an appointment to see a GP, since I had enough sense to know that was the gateway, and it fell on the Monday after Easter. And now I'm going to close, because I would write all day long, but the physical therapist is coming in an hour and I'd like to rest, and if I tell you everything, what, as my mother used to say, will you have to look forward to?

New Hip plus Frankenstorm

Well, since I'm a baby boomer, I suppose it makes sense that I finally need a replacement part. I've read an awful lot of stuff that promised to tell you everything about getting a new hip, but they were lying. So, while I'm recuperating, I'll try to really tell you everything about getting a new hip (from my perspective) and then, how rehab goes. It started, for me, with pain. I don't have arthritis anywhere in my body, but I did, for reasons I may or may not go into, have pain in my left hip. I always knew it was there; I never got used to it. I began starting my day with a prophylactic 2 Advil and for quite a while that worked.