Path of Least Resistance

Another page in the plague journal: keep mourners to ten or
Uncle Jim's unburied corpse will haunt your dreams

Hip Surgery Revisited

4 years, 5 months, 1 week, and 6 days ago, I had hip replacement surgery, which brought an end to 1 year, 7 months and 6 days of pain from osteoarthritis.

Not satisfied to know that I was merely out of pain, people would ask me after my surgery whether the whole rest of my life had been restored as it was. 

Not entirely. My surgeon somewhat impatiently explained, "you can't possibly expect an artificial hip to have the same range of motion as a natural hip."

As is my wont, I took that sage advice on advisement - because even natural hips have different ranges depending on the person - and set out to test the limits of my new hip, specifically in terms of a yoga practice.

I assumed Ashtanga yoga was a non-starter, and learned through experimentation that most other classes, even Yin yoga, were too risky one way or another.

So that left yoga at home. I did back and hamstring and shoulder stretches every day. As the post operation years and months passed I stretched the limits of my stretching until one day, two weeks ago, I felt I might have stretched too far.

I had.

A slightly dislocated artificial hip hurts more than anything you could possibly imagine, but only under certain circumstances. Those circumstances are the fifteen to thirty minutes after I rose from sitting on a soft chair or from lying in bed. Once the hip settled back in, I could stand and walk without any pain.

So, for the past two weeks, during the day, I have been standing or walking or sitting perched on the edge of hard chairs to keep the hip in place and the pain at bay. At night, I cinched a yoga strap around my hips to stabilize the joint. My new morning routine included gingerly hobbling around the bedroom for half an hour until the pain subsided.

I wondered how I could live like this. Long car rides, or flights, seemed out of the question. Movies, if theatres ever reopen, would also be more anguish than they're worth.

Entreaties I have made to health care professionals have so far gone unanswered, so I can only speculate that what I was doing to avoid pain also served as therapy. I'm sitting on the couch as I type this, confident that when I stand I will not be hit with excruciating, debilitating and crippling pain. The hip's reset.

And I now know for absolute certain, 4 years, 5 months, 3 weeks, and 6 days after the fact, what are the limits of my hip.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

That's a relief.