I have spent a couple of very busy weeks shopping for Christmas gifts for the people closest to me. I now only have a couple of days left to organise myself and get ready for the hospital and my hip replacement operation.
Before I have the operation I wanted to come on the blog and write about how I got here… about why I need a hip replacement.
There is a history of arthritis in my family, but arthritis is an invisible ailment in a lot of ways and looking back, although I knew both my parents complained of arthritis, they never went into any details about what the problem was exactly. I remember that my dad had arthritis in his neck and in recent years I’ve felt twinges, stiffness and creaks in my own neck, so the idea of maybe having arthritis has crossed my mind a few times. Although It was still very much along the lines of ‘something I might have in the future’.
My Hip Story
Five years ago I slipped on black ice, and fell badly down several stone steps. I was carrying a bin bag of rubbish in my left hand so fell very heavily onto my left hip. When I was sat at the bottom of the steps, feeling shaken, I was convinced that I must have broken something and definitely believed that I’d injured my hip. It was early in the morning, in a small village, and the place was deserted. In fact both the road and path outside of the house were as slippy as the steps I’d just fallen down, so I soon realised that no one would be coming to my rescue. I was unable to stand up because of the ice – so I shuffled along, onto a grassed area, and carefully got back onto my feet. I was surprised that I could stand up, and even more surprised that I could walk absolutely fine. So, nothing broken then? I got on with my day.
The bruise was quite spectacular and I was sore, but I was just relieved that it wasn’t anything more serious. So it was maybe six months later when I eventually went to see the GP. There was an area of swelling that just wasn’t going away, and the soreness and pain was hanging around for a little too long.
I had an x-ray, then I had another x-ray on a more sensitive machine. My hip appeared to be undamaged. The only comment was that there was an area of Osteoarthritis, “but nothing more than you would maybe expect to see in someone of your age”. At the time I just thought something along the lines of… parents, arthritis, and something that might cause problems in the distant future.
Eighteen months later brought us into a new year. I still had pain, in fact the pain had increased, it went across my lower back, down through my left hip, and there was horrendous sciatica type pain down my left leg. I was walking with quite a bad limp and feeling fairly miserable with myself. I went back to the GP, I wanted to find out what exactly the problem was. (This wasn’t the first time I had been back to the GP, I had tried several different types of painkiller by this point and had had several trips to the physiotherapist – this particular GP visit is just a significant point in the story). This time I had an MRI on my lower back. It showed some small issues with the discs there, but nothing that really explained the pain I was in, and certainly nothing that was bad enough to do anything about. My hip wasn’t looked at again – because we already knew that my hip was fine(?).
This left me in a strange position. I was in quite severe pain and limping badly by this point – but there wasn’t any reason for it(??)
I left the doctors surgery with the intention of losing weight – because surely the pain would be less if I was carrying around less weight?
I lost weight. I went swimming, walking, did other exercise routines at home. Yet I became incredible frustrated, because it seemed that the more I lost weight the more pain I was in. Although now I can see that it was just the passage of time, yes I lost weight over a period of two years, but also over this time the Osteoarthritis in my hip was gradually getting worse.
Around the beginning of this year I noticed that I could no longer stand on my left leg (when standing on one leg) and I started to need to sit down to get dressed. There was a confusion of pain – I still wasn’t actually aware of any hip pain at this point – the main pain I experienced was in the lower back and down my leg.
A little later I noticed that my left foot was tending to rotate to the left and this was causing knee pain. I tried to straighten out my foot when I walked, the knee pain got better, but now my hip hurt!
So off I went back to the GP, my son’s graduation was coming up and I didn’t think I was going to manage the walking involved. A juggle of painkillers later, and I did manage the graduation weekend. However by this point I had realised that I was needing to hold on to the walls and chair backs when I walked around the house, and I was now using a walking pole all the time outside of the house (I’d been using one for a couple of years when walking outside for any distance – but not to walk around shops and supermarkets – now I was needing to use one all the time). Up to this point, I was mainly using it for balance, but at some point during the weekend I started needing to use the pole as a walking stick. I need to put weight onto the (shortened) pole in order to walk.
After we returned home I had two days when I struggled to walk at all and was in a serious amount of pain. I returned to the GP. This time it was a different GP. I told him that I could now really feel that the pain was located in my hip, and he agreed. He said he could see immediately I walked in the room that I had a problem with my hip.
So, there you go, it was my hip all along.
More later…