The last few months have been full of can’t spell and can’t pronounce words for me. The swing down into illiteracy comes from a diagnosis this winter of acetabular dysplasia. It’s a condition that ballerinas and large dogs manage to get. Since I am neither a ballet dancer nor canine, I just don’t understand how it could be me that is tagged with this hard to spell/hard to say bone condition.
It’s been bugging me for much of my life but sadly, with our crazy health-care system, each attempt, post-adolescence, I’ve made to obtain a diagnosis has ended in “oh, you don’t need an x-ray, just “blank”” we fill in the blank with “take it easy”, “lose weight”, “do physical therapy to strengthen muscles” and so forth. Finally in January, after 4 months of killer pain which has been making it impossible for me to even do a good job sailing, and 3 months of trying to get an appointment with my doctor in Maryland, I called my HMO office and said “I’m going to be there camped on your doorstep from January 19-26. You WILL do an x-ray of my hip. I will pay for it out-of-pocket if I have to, but you WILL do it. And, indeed, they did the x-ray and found a severe case of developmental dysplasia.
The x-ray tech said “well, this will give you something to talk to your doctor about!” The x-ray was one day, the Dr. appointment the following. She walked in the room, said “there’s nothing you can do–no PT, no lifestyle change, no weight loss, nothing…you need surgery…here’s a consult to a surgeon.” and accusingly “I don’t how you could have lived this long without KNOWING there was something seriously wrong with your pelvis.”
Let’s not go there.
After staying in So. Cal thinking we’d have it fixed any week and could then sail North…5 months of trying to get it sorted out and fixed have come and gone. This included several visits to surgeons and talks on the phone to my insurance company and a change in insurance region to cut down the paperwork, I had a total hip replacement surgery on Tuesday June 14th and went home in the morning of Friday June 17th. Ahh….my hip feels better. Though I must admit my muscles feel awful, David has to help me get into bed (I can stumble out on my own); we’re on a dock rather than at anchor, and I’m clunking about the pier with a walker. I’ve got another week or so of giving myself shots in the tummy of the blood thinner Lovenox, I’ve got a huge prescription of Vicodin for pain. Pills I keep forgetting to take until I’m wincing and sniffling from the pain, silly me. I have a follow up visit with the surgeon tomorrow, should have stitches out next week and have 20 visits of PT to do between now and August 1st. Then, with the surgeon’s blessing, we should be sailing up the coast to San Francisco Bay. Yea!
For all of you who didn’t know about this health issue, sorry not to share before. I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it while it was all still so open ended without a fix in sight!
Now, back to that wrinkled varnish….I tried hard to get it done before going into surgery, but that seems to have been a total waste of effort.
Next…
