My Left Artificial Hip Is Going To Be Replaced
[ Monday October 28th 2024 at 4:48 pm ]
I spent a full hour with my surgeon. The look on his face was truly horrible when I explained what has transpired. I started crying when I told him how bad this has got.
In short the artificial hip is going to be replaced. It is fraught with risk. But when I told him I was prepared to cut my left leg off because of how bad this is got he was prepared to offer me the surgery. It will be early 2025 when it is actually going to be replaced. The typical wait would be 12 months.
The hip anatomy teaching model was very useful. The MRI report I brought from when the tear that was surgically repaired in 2007 occurred again 54 weeks later satisfied my hip surgeon that I am able to understand and interpret pain.
The surgeon wants me to get into my pain doctor about the nausea getting out of control. I will arrange this tomorrow.
One of the concerns my surgeon has is that since the hip pain has lasted more than 6 months he is concerned my brain chemistry could have changed. There is the possibility that the hip could be replaced and I experience phantom pain. My right artificial hip is okay. If this happens I will need to do mirror therapy to teach my brain that the left hip is not a source of pain any more.
The surgeon intends to use a different style artificial hip on me. What he wants to do is very technically challenging for him. He wants to be able to add a liner (think of it as a glove) to go over top of my artificial hip and act as a barrier to my hip socket. This would make the symptoms I am explaining physically impossible to occur with the new style hip.
The surgeon had another patient last week who was experiencing the same grinding I was originally experiencing from December 2023 to August 2024 with the artificial hip. Yet this patient has no pain. He thought of me. It still doesn't make sense why this is happening to me. When I was to my local hospital in February 2024 the nurse said to me sometimes an artificial hip just goes bad even though it looks fine on x-ray and simply needs to be replaced. She told me not to defeat myself trying to figure out what I did wrong to cause this.
They are unlikely to use my spine to sedate me and have to put me out with a general anaesthesia. The drugs put into the spine for surgery won't last long enough for the surgeon to do the work to fix me.
While all this has been going on my right knee also became exponentially worse. When I use the knee during the day time it is like a round lollipop now appears over top of where my pain doctor showed me where the meniscus tear is. My hip surgeon wants me to continue the process of pursuing treatment with the knee surgeon on account of the wait times that are experienced. The orthopaedic clinic nurse practitioner filled out the medical travel form for me to attend appointments with my knee surgeon. She listened to me when I explained the travel would cause a migraine headache if I had to go to to Ottawa and home again in 1 day. The Government of Ontario is being required to put me into a wheelchair friendly hotel room to let my body be able to recover.
I'd really like a long hug. The past 2 months have been so physically demanding. I am going to try and get my friend Andy to come visit me this week. The pain sensation that my artificial hip is biting me followed by nausea and 6 weeks of being extremely weak (and never getting a break from this as the biting pain continued to occur more frequently) has been a marathon I really could have done without. I am perfectly willing to endure anything caused by my Legg Perthes disease. But I am so glad this has a defined end date.