Monthly Archives: June 2015

Day 5

Posted on by

0

I have been home for three nights and two full days. So far, my recovery is fortunately pretty stagnant. My pain never increases or decreases, only my energy and crankiness levels fluctuate. I get easily exhausted by visitors (please don’t let this deter you from visiting!) and from moving around too much. I’ve tried to take some quality naps, though it usually ends up with me just laying in bed half asleep.

My home CPM machine arrived on Thursday. This was a MUCH better experience than the hospital. It helps that our bed is (obviously) perfectly flat and I can readjust however I desire. I really enjoy sleeping in the machine because it keeps me from getting stiff and sore, and for some reason it also is uncomfortable to have my knee perfectly straight.

Two amazing home nurses came to visit on Thursday. They changed my wound dressing, allowing me the first view of my scar. It’s amazing how much work they can do through only a 4-inch incision! It was smaller and neater than either Jon or I anticipated, so I am looking forward to minimal scarring. The nurses will come twice a week until I can start outpatient physical therapy. They both brightened my day by admiring how well I was recovering.

My ice machine made a miraculous return. Friday morning I got a call from Barnes-Jewish, and it was the security lady I had left a voicemail for on Wednesday when it went missing! Amazingly, some kind soul turned it in to lost and found. Jon’s mom went and picked it up for me immediately and I have been happily icing ever since.

I kicked out the Vistaril from my pain management regimen yesterday. After researching my medicine side effects, I deduced that it was Vistaril that was making my eyes unable to focus and my brain just generally mushy. I woke up today feeling more clear-headed and focused than I had all week, and no noticeable difference in my pain, so that’s great. My goal for this coming week is to gradually cut down on the frequency with which I take Norco.

Everything is going well. I can’t believe how lucky I am with a relatively issue-free recovery so far. Looking forward to my next Clohisy visit (in 3.5 weeks….) and an X-ray to see how my bones are growing. Onward!

What the heck was I thinking?

Posted on by

0

(Written Wednesday evening, a few hours after we arrived home from the hospital. Most of it didn’t hold true starting the next day, but I still need to post it because it shows the horrible, along with the great)

Day 3.

I have made a horrible mistake. How could I have decided to do this to myself? Every time I make a movement my crotch cries out “WHYYYYY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!” And I cry right back, because I don’t have a good answer. It feels like there’s a little elf in there with a tiny knife when I move in a terrible way.

Otherwise, The last two days have been pretty good pain-wise. I was walking and talking and had a great appetite and all of that went downhill the second I got home. Actually, it got shitty the second the nurse tried to “help” me into the car but didn’t realize I couldn’t put full weight on my leg/hip and let me almost fall and die. Traumatic. I think that episode is the cause of my extreme discomfort currently.

Then we get home and realize we had left my saving grace, the Kodiak water machine ice pack, on the curb of the hospital. Jon zoomed back to get it but it was gone for good.

Now I am positioned ever-so-carefully in my bed with a zillion pillows and all my pain pills within arms reach. I can’t see myself sleeping very well, though I don’t have the CPM machine tonight strapped in tonight, so we will see. I already miss the nurses coming in every 4 hours to give me meds and take care of my needs. It was nice to not have to worry about my pill schedule, and it was extra nice to be able to try out a bunch of different meds to figure out what worked best. My current concoction is 2 Norcos every 4 hours, a Vistaril every 6, and a naproxen every 12. It worked well in the hospital but I’m a little concerned about my pain levels now, so we might have to reevaluate tomorrow.

Well, wish my husband luck. I’m so unhappy. This is a side of Lydia you never ever want to see.

The day my life changed.

Posted on by

0

We arrived at the hospital at 10am on a bright, sunny Monday morning. I hopped and skipped all the way to the hospital, knowing that it would be my last chance to do so for quite some time. It was easy enough to find surgery registration, where we signed my life away and took a seat in an enormous, cavernous waiting room filled with waiting families. 10ish minutes later, my time was up.

We were taken back to a semi-private gurney area where I changed my clothes, took a urine sample (surprise! not pregnant), got stuck 3 times before they finally got an IV going (I normally have excellent veins, but today they were not cooperating), answered “What are you here for?” more times than I could count, and gave my husbands’ hand the death grip. I was so nervous and on the brink of tears the whole time. Finally, Clohisy and his resident came by to verify everything and signed my hip and that was that. They stuck some anxiety meds into my IV and I don’t remember anything after that. I wish I remembered giving mangosquash a goodbye kiss.

Before I knew it, I was awake in recovery and feeling okay. The only semi-funny thing I remember exclaiming was “it doesn’t hurt very much!”, and then I remember being annoyed because they kept telling me it would be 2 hours until my husband could visit. Then 1:45 until he could visit. Then 1:30 until he could visit. DUDE BRING ME MY HUSBAND I’M SCARED AND ALONE AND SO COLD. I also remember they made me arch my back so they could shove an x-ray screen behind my hips and I though “you’re letting me do this myself? after you just chopped my hips in half?!”, and then I demanded they make me a copy of the X-ray so I could show everyone. I am glad for high, pushy Lydia because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten to see the X-ray at all. So proud.

After what felt like forever. my dear husband came back and I was soooooo relieved. He showed me all the text conversations he’d been having with my loved ones (thank you to everyone for your prayers and and care and concern and good vibes and juju and everything! I know it helped get Jon through while he was waiting) and I tried responding, but every single word had a spelling error (full disclosure – so did every single word of the previous two blog posts I posted. It took me a VERY long time to have to backspace and correct every. single. word. I wish I was kidding. Don’t blog high, kids.) so I took some selfies instead.

From recovery, they took me up to my room. I don’t remember much of the transfer but I do remember asking many, many times if I would have my own room (thank you again, high Lydia, for being my advocate). The nurse said “technically it’s a shared room, but we aren’t very busy so 90% chance it’ll be all yours”. And I got lucky, which meant Jon could stay both nights with me. I can’t imagine sharing a room, with all the midnight wake-ups and people coming and going for me AND another person, I never would have slept!

That first night, my pain never got above a 6 or 7, and that was only when I had to move around. When I was stationary, it was a comfortable 3 or 4. I had a pain pump (AMAAAAZING!) and a catheter (ALSO amaaaazing!) so I had a constant flow of relief AND I didn’t have to get up to use the bathroom. Seriously, if you have an option to get a catheter during surgery or any hospital stay, DO IT. It seems awkward and uncomfortable, but it saves you from having to get up at all. I wish I had one now for pure laziness reasons…..

With my nurses help, I was able to get up and take a little journey around my room with a walker. It was a shock to my system, for SURE, plus I was battling super low blood pressure for the duration of my hospital stay, so I ended up getting sick not too long after. I started drinking sugary juice with every med time and drinking lots of water, and I was luckily fine for the rest of my stay.

Sleeping ended up not being as horrible as I anticipated, either, one of my drugs (Vistaril) ended up KNOCKING ME OUT, like falling asleep with my eyes open and jolting myself awake kind of knocking out. My surgeon had requested I sleep in a CPM machine (continuous passive motion) to keep my hip flexing throughout the night. When the CPM delivery man came in to fit me is when I had my one and only hospital breakdown. The machine is the length of a leg, with a leg cradle attached to a motorized base. There was a metal bar that sits parallel to the bed right under the thigh, but because of the angle at which I had my bed positioned at the time, it ended up about 2 inches off the bed and right underneath my butt (RIGHT where I just had some bones rearranged). The CPM man was NOT a medical professional at all, and just kind of grabbed my leg and plopped it in the cradle with no regards to my broken hip, so that was shocking and painful. He started babbling on to me about how it works and I’m sitting there overwhelmed and in pain from his actions and this stupid metal bar under my butt, and he kept saying “oh you’ll get used to it” and finally, through tears, I managed to tell him “NO I WILL NOT THERE IS A BAR UNDER MY BUTT THIS IS NOT OKAY, you need to fix it!”. He still didn’t quite understand and finally my nurse came in and she realized what I meant. We just needed to flatten my bed almost all the way and then it was fine. I am still mad at Mr. CPM machine. I wish I could fill out a customer service survey on my experience with him. Luckily, it ended up being ok, and sleeping was more comfortable with the CPM machine because it kept me from getting stiff, and also kept me from wanting to roll onto my sides, my usual sleeping position.

Tuesday was an overall amazing day. I had a physical therapist come visit me to teach me strengthening exercises and get me up walking. Because of how well my surgery had gone, Clohisy had released me to 50% weight bearing (normal is 20%!) so moving around was a lot easier because I could actually use my bum leg for more than just balance. I quickly decided that my crutches would be my main means of transportation, mostly because our house is too small for a walker, and also they’re just easier to maneuver. My PT was amazed with the ease at which I could move around which made me feel GREAT. Honestly, I had expected everything to be WAY more difficult and MUCH more painful than it was. The only thing that really caused me any excruciating pain was swinging my legs off the bed. I have figured out that I can slide up from the bottom of the bed and crawl my way back to avoid this, though, so that’s great. I also had a visit from the occupational therapist to teach me how to use tools to put on my pants and underwear and socks and shoes. That visit wasn’t very exciting, honestly.

The two days at the hospital flew by. I tried out some different pain meds before finding a combo that would work at home. I found that my brain was extremely fuzzy, making it so hard to focus on anything, including watching a simple TV show, so I sat and colored and went on Facebook and talked to Jon and the nurses. Speaking of nurses, I had three AMAZING nurses and one nurse I didn’t see much of the day of my release. Shout out to Annie, Marie, and Michael! My dear friends Lindsey and Maria came to visit, along with a pastor from our church and Jon’s parents. It was nice to see some outside faces, but MAN did it wipe me out.

Finally, on Wednesday, I got to go home!

Anxious

Posted on by

0

There is one thing that I am particularly good at, and that is worrying about and overthinking most things. As you can imagine, this whole surgery process was one big continuous anxious event.

I had three months to wait between scheduling surgery and the actual surgery date. While this is fairly standard for anyone getting a PAO, due to the limited specialists in the states, I do not recommend waiting this long. If you are like me, you will take advantage of that time to read about it, talk to other people that had the surgery, think about it, and learn as much as possible about the surgery and recovery. That probably sounds like a good thing, to be over prepared, but it was horrible for my anxiety. By mid-May, about halfway through my waiting period, I had stopped researching altogether and I had to remove myself from the amazing Facebook support group I had become a part of. I had learned TOO much, and was constantly thinking about the negatives, what-if’s, risks, and worst case scenarios. Surgery filled every thought I had, and became so unhealthy because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. If I wanted my hip to get better, I need the surgery. I can either get it now, while I am young and healthy and childless, or wait until my symptoms are more extreme in my 30’s or 40’s, when I have small children to take care of and my body won’t bounce back as quickly, and risk having to get a total hip replacement. The PAO is a hip preservation surgery to hopefully stave off the need to ever get a THR, as those greatly limit your activities forever.

So by the time my surgery arrived, I was not really in a good place mentally. I had tried to stop thinking about it at all and go into surgery with a very open mind, prepared to kick butt in recovery, but if I’m being honest, I felt like a small child inside throwing a tantrum. The day before my surgery, this past Sunday, I refused to pack my hospital bag for the longest time. I was in a state of denial about what was about to happen. Most of my day was filled with on-and-off panic attacks and lots of tears. Why was I doing this to myself? Why me? Why now? Is there anyway I can get out of the surgery? Maybe I don’t need to be active ever again! I can give up running and walking and sports and comfortable pregnancies and childbirth, right?

It was horrible. And then I had the surgery the following morning.

Periacetabular Osteotomy

Posted on by

0

Hello all,

I must apologize for my absence. I promise it was for a mostly good reason. Remember how I said back in January one of my goals was to go to the gym more and run, but that I was still in physical therapy for some hip issues?

Turns out these hip issues aren’t just a little fixable problem. It’s a HUGE fixable problem, and it’s called hip dysplasia. Basically my hip sockets are too shallow so the head of my femur doesn’t sit in the acetabulum deep enough, thus causing instability, weakness, pain, and eventually osteoarthritis. Luckily, I have zero arthritis in my hips and I’m pretty young and overall healthy, allowing me to be a perfect candidate for a hip preservation surgery called “Periacetabular Osteotomy”. Sound scary?

IT IS SCARY. They make a 4-8 inch incision on the front of your hip, move aside muscles and tendons, and then they cut your pelvic bone around the socket, rotate it, and screw it back into place, allowing new bone will grow in the “holes” and making it as good as new (most likely).

So after seeing 2 ortho surgeons, one finally said the term “hip dysplasia”, causing me to cry. I had googled everything that could even remotely sound like my symptoms, and when I got to hip dysplasia, I shrugged it off quickly. Turns out, it was real.

I found via Instagram a young lady my age also had DDH (developmental dysplasia of the hip – a fancy term for “acquiring it in your growing years”) and had flown up to St. Louis from Texas to get it fixed with this surgery. It was through her that I found out about Dr. Clohisy, one of the top 5 surgeons in the States that perform this surgery, and one of maybe 20 in the states that even perform the surgery with any regularity. I called him in January to get an appointment and was told that he had an 8-week waiting list for visits. So I waited.

Finally March 10 rolled around and I am so nervous. Certainly he wasn’t going to tell me I need to slice my hips in half, right? Boy was I wrong. He walked me through step-by-step the nature of the surgery and how it would help my own specific hips. I scheduled my surgery that day – June 22 is now D-Day. Over 3 months away. Sounds great.

Full disclosure: I am now on the other side of the surgery with a much more realistic outlook about the surgery and recovery process. It sucks. So definitely stay tuned.