You Know When.

You know you need surgery when:

• first clue was when my hip started hurting when going over bumps in the car
• Maxing out the daily recommended Tylenol dose every day (plus needing other meds)
• Waking up every time I roll over in bed (assuming subluxing the dang hip)
• Ice becoming my best friend (don't forget the constantly on heating pad for the back)
• Choosing to wear slip on shoes as much as possible because I can barely tie up laces
• Developing amazing, yet awkward ways of shaving my legs (it can be done in the shower without having to flex hip near 90 degrees!)
• Having to decline social outings because I have just worked all day and need to lie down
• Hating the damp and rainy weather....yes I am an amazing weatherwoman these days
• Having a countdown on my phone that keeps track of my anticipated surgery date (I am actually looking forward to getting fixed)
• Other hip starting to hurt because that is the only leg I really stand on these days
• Hurting before I even get out of bed in the morning (which is highly depressing)

Although depressing, this is certainly personally justifying that I in fact do require more surgery.  It's so tough to keep pretending that things are fine, having previous surgeons tell me things are fine, when they are actually not fine.  I am not very vocal about my hip problem socially with my friends and at school.  It's almost embarrassing to say that I need even more surgery and that all of the previous surgeries were essentially a waste as they did not fix the underlying structural abnormality.  I am, myself, disgusted that it has come to this point.  I had put my life on hold a year ago to have two more scopes (one on each side) and now I am no better off....in fact, my left is even worse!

I have been thinking, as of late, that I should notify my previous surgeon's staff of the final outcome of my hip.  He had performed three surgeries on me last year and the surgeon has no idea how I am doing.  I would have kept in touch with them and "complained" to them regarding my inability to return to normal activity, but they were very insistent that I need a break from medications and was outright told not to call back for several months.  I feel like if this isn't the biggest hint to not call back ever, I'm not sure what is!  I wish there was a good way to go about notifying the staff of my situation.  I may construct an email and send it off to them when I get closer to my PAO in the new year.  I do seriously believe that they should know what is going on and how their work helped (or did not help).  This is one of the ways surgeons can become better surgeons.  Perhaps if I notify them, they will look more thoroughly at dysplastic hips and have a lower threshold for referring out to a surgeon who does PAOs.  Despite the fact that the surgeon I previously saw was the hip scope guru, I think he is too scope happy....and add this with a bit of over-confidence in his abilities to fix pathology with hips, spells out a recipe for over-scoping and under-PAO/FO/SDD-ing.  Having said this, with proper patient selection, the hip scope can be very successful and help a lot of people with hip pain.

That's my two cents from a rambling-annoyed-and-hurting-gal-trying-to-survive-through-med-school-with-bum-hips point of view.