I did okay, but not as well as I thought I would

Hello, it’s me again. I’m reporting in with progress post my hip replacement operation which took place in July – something I haven’t done in a while.

In advance of undergoing the knife I had received medical opinion from all quarters that I should put off having a replacement for as long as possible because of the general belief the op was a once in a lifetime thing. In other words, the younger you are when you have the operation, the more likely it is you will have similar or worse pain and discomfort towards the end of your life. Conversely, the older you are when you submit to the knife, the greater the chances that you’ll peg it before you reach that unfortunate end-of-life situation when the ‘replaced’ hip goes wrong and there’s nothing that can be done.

However. Every non-medical person I came across – and more tellingly, every non-medical person I met who had ever had a hip replacement – without exception counselled me to ignore the quacks for two reasons.

Firstly, the joys of ‘getting back to how you were’ (i.e. before you had the arthritis-related symptoms from which you were suffering) were so great that you’d soon forget you ever had a hip problem.

Secondly, by nature all medics were a bunch of pessimists. Almost certainly their strident warnings about the dangers of having an early ‘replacement’ were wide of the mark. The way medical science leaps forward in bounds these days, even if your new hip lasted just fifteen to twenty years max as they were claiming, as sure as eggs are eggs by that time someone would have come along and made second ‘replacements’ (or even third or fourth ones) absolutely routine procedures.

In the end – as some readers may be aware – I lasted about two and half years of chronic arthritic pain, plus the development of a pronounced limp to cope with it, before deciding that ‘enough was enough’ and signed up for the operation.

I regard myself as an ‘Up and at ‘em!’ sort of a guy. The one thing that all ‘hippers’ had advised me was that ‘getting back to normal’ after an operation – in terms of walking without a limp etc. – was a long, hard slog during which it was imperative that you did your given exercises diligently because failure to do so would have a downward snowball effect.

My reaction was that if, as alleged, it took six to eight weeks before one made significant ‘non limping’ progress, three months before a comforting state of near-normal walking was reached … and six months in total before you reached the ‘hippers’ Nirvana – the point at which you couldn’t even remember you ever had a hip problem in the first place – then I would achieve all those in a third of the time mentioned.

Well okay, half then.

Dear readers, I proved myself completely wrong. Although I achieved my first ‘goal’ – by appearing at my niece’s wedding in August (one week after my operation) already able to walk with only one stick instead of two, thereafter my progress became patchy and then frustrating and disappointing.

Overall I would give myself no more than a score of about 6 out of 10. At first I did my exercises regularly, but when I found I was no longer making daily progress with them I began to let them slip. Within a couple of weeks I was barely doing them at all. Instead I was walking about as best I could with no sticks – and probably limping about as badly as I ever was before the operation.

The key – I came to decide – was nothing to do with being opened up, having my muscles bashed about and my hip bone hollowed out (i.e. the operation itself).

It was actually primarily about the fact that – due to my arthritic hip – I had learned to walk with a limp to limit the discomfort. When you limp, instinctively or deliberately, the normal muscles you most often use to walk (well, some of them anyway) tend to atrophy. Instead, in order to limp, you develop whole banks of muscles that hitherto you never used, or used much.

As a result, after the operation, it is more instinctively normal to continue limping than to suddenly not do so.

In other words, you have to begin a process of (1) stopping using the ‘bad’ but newly-strengthened muscles you developed in the meantime and simultaneously (2) training those muscles that for decade after decade you had always used to walk properly to ‘wake up’ and strengthen themselves, so that you could eventually begin walking without a limp again.

Today I now type before you about 90% of the way to ‘hippers’ Nirvana. Generally-speaking, I can walk about without a discernible limp, save when I have been sitting down – either at the computer, or at the wheel of a car – for a couple of hours or so. On those occasions afterwards I find myself somewhat stiff and ‘limpy’ for about half an hour, until (this is not the best analogy) the ‘wheels have been oiled a bit’ and my non-limping gait can kick in once more.

I’m feeling pretty good right now. I have no discomfort in bed, either lying in any position I choose or when moving about – as I used to have constantly in the bad old days of arthritis-suffering. I can walk without a limp most of the time, although after about half a mile or so of continuous walking I find that I have to begin to concentrate in order to walk without a limp.

I can still do it, but I do have to concentrate, rather that doing it unconsciously as an ordinary person with two legs and no issues would.

My six months post-op period comes up in mid-January. Hopefully, with a fair wind, I shall be as good as new by then!