A Long Time Coming: Part I
This is a weird post to write...I've already erased it a number of times. But I hope that by telling this story, someone else may benefit from my experience and let go of their ego-mind far sooner than I did. It’s taken me a couple decades to get to the point where I could acknowledge the strange set of circumstances and feelings that led me to wait so long to address this particular issue. I acknowledge that this initial share is a little long, but hopefully it’s worth it!
As a physical professional, a healer of bodies, and an expert in injury prevention, talking about people’s pain has been a daily practice for me. It has also left my perceptions skewed as to how much I expressed my own experience of pain.
I believed that I had told folks about my own injury, that I had whined and winced and groaned enough to drive everyone else mad. It turns out however, that I have been far more stoic and off-handed about it than I thought…and I only know this because now that I am going to get this addressed “for good”, I’m encountering surprised and befuddled responses from those around me--“What do you mean? A hip replacement? What’s wrong? I never knew things were so bad! You’re so young!”—well, not as young as I once was. :)
Physical pain has been such a daily experience for me, that I didn't honestly realize how well I was masking it from the world. I perceived my limp as more than subtle. I perceived my groans as I stood up or came out of yoga postures as deliberate expressions of my deteriorating state. I perceived that by relating to clients and friends by saying, “You should have that hip checked out…it sounds a lot like my torn labrum”, that they heard me, and understood I was feeling just as yucky as they were.
In truth, I was usually reticent in the face of my worsening symptoms. I tried not to take as many pills because of their side effects, so my energy started to plummet as the pain ate it away. I can only now realize that there were sub- or unconscious feelings at play that kept me from truly expressing what was occurring in my own life. As if a tiny, nearly inaudible voice has been saying, "If I am a healer, I should have the tools to heal this. If I am a movement professional, I should be able to rehab this. If I am teaching people every day how to prevent their own injuries, I should not be injured myself.” My ego was eating away at any ability to directly address what was happening inside my body.
Pain has been a constant in my life. I struggled with joint and muscle pain for much of my childhood—“Growing pains,” said the adults around me, “you’ll grow out of them.” This was a theory that never made sense to me. "How will growing stop pain that is caused by growing?!” My young mind was bent out of shape by the notion. Eventually, so was my trust in those adults, as those pains merely evolved and moved around. Some got worse while others disappeared for years at a time before popping up again, seemingly at random.
By junior high I was begging for a doctor’s note to release me from the mile-run—a nationwide, government-mandated educational prescription to ensure that American youth could be active and healthy, and asses if they were not. Don’t get me wrong, I know that few kids were excited about this particular practice, but for me it was an yearly exercise in torture that resulted in days of swollen knees and an achey back.
The funny part is that I wasn’t a sedentary kid. I grew up playing outside, roughhousing with no fear of dirt or harm. I was not as hard core as my little brother, but I kept up. Running through the woods and fields at our grandparent’s property, climbing trees and hanging from branches, riding bikes at break-neck speeds or jumping them off curbs and root-raised sidewalk slabs. I was strong. I was coordinated. We learned to snow ski when we were very young—I was 5. It is a fall at that age where I believe my initial hip injury may have occurred; the tip of my ski buried in a snow berm while I lay helplessly on my back, my entire leg torqued at wrong angles from hip to boot. Each joint along the way was twisted absurdly. I was young, and seemed to bounce back rather quickly, but did I really? My young life continued on the side of mountains in Winter, and all Summer being pulled behind a boat on skis or boards (where high-speed falls sent me skipping across the surface of the water, my limbs feeling like doll parts, not totally attached to my body), gymnastics and dance (where my natural hypermobility was lauded by coaches as an asset back then).
So by the time I entered junior high, I had correlated these sports and activities with the myriad pains that plagued me. However, as I slowly backed away from these efforts and eventually did become inactive, the pain didn’t go away, it simply evolved again. Now I just felt weak AND achey. In high school I spent countless hours sitting at the sidelines of football and basketball practices, or bent over tables in the training room, acting as the student athletic trainer in charge of minimizing and preventing injuries to the players. It’s a not-so-subtle irony that while helping them, my poor posture and intrinsic instabilities were contributing more to my own injuries and pain.
I was 16 when I received my first cortisone shot to relieve my debilitating sciatic symptoms. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stand or sit for more than 20 minutes without eliciting the droning ache, or the feeling that someone had wrapped my bones in barbed wire and it was scraping away at my joints and muscles. That’s fucking intense for a teenager. PT didn’t help, the shot didn’t help, so I made it through the next decade or so by swallowing large doses of ibuprofen daily. It was unsustainable, for sure, but I could live my life.
I eventually found my yoga practice and my perspectives started shifting. I was more self-aware than ever, and started paying more particular attention to movement, inflammation and pain. I was able to determine that my hip was a bit of a mess, independent of other issues, and that there was no clear pattern to its ups and downs. Sometimes stretching helped, sometimes it made things much worse. Same with activity; one day I felt amazing after squats or big hip opening standing sequences, while another I may find these utterly inaccessible due to acute pain in those actions. Frustration has been the name of the game for the last 12 years.
Fast forward to a couple months ago…
I’d slogged my way through a moderately successful career of bodywork and yoga and education, to finally find myself in a position to look deeper and more directly at this issue. My intuition had long ago made the assessment that the labrum (cartilage) in my left hip was torn. Now that I had a surgeon looking at my MRI, I was informed that yes, there was a torn labrum, but also:
Bone spurs on my thigh bone and pelvis.
Low-grade dysplasia (which, with my hypermobility made it tough for my ball to remain securely in its socket).
Inflammation and scar tissue at the joint capsule.
Delamination of the cartilage in the socket.
Chondromalacia of the cartilage on both the ball and the socket.
In the words of the doctor, “Your hip is pretty pissed off.” She also said that because this joint had such long list of issues, even though some were relatively minor, that I was not an ideal candidate for the arthroscopy that would attempt to repair some of these things. “You’re 100% going to need a new hip eventually. Because of the complex nature of this degeneration, it would be totally reasonable for you to consider a full replacement now.” She then went on to describe rehab:
Scope = NO weight bearing for 2-6 weeks (full time crutches), PT 2x/week for 12 weeks followed by 12 weeks @ 1x/week, NO rotation of that femur for four months…and total recover around 10 months.
Replacement = Weight bearing on day of surgery, walking with a cane until my limp is gone (2-4 weeks), normal activities by six weeks, internal stitches dissolve at three months (allowing for stretching and full range of motion).
Let me tell you…this was not a hard sell.
So, here we are. This is the day before surgery. I arrive at OHSU tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. to check in for this thing that will likely change life as I’ve known it, forever. It’s humbling and it’s not going to be an easy six weeks, but every fiber of my being knows that this is the exact right thing to be doing.
I’ll write more in the next few weeks, outlining both what I’ve done to prepare and how the outcomes go. I really do hope this will be of use to someone, but if not, at least I have an outlet for the duration of this experiment in living!
I’ll see you on the other side,
~Richelle
P.S. If you want to see an animated video of the procedure I’m going through in the morning, here ya go. It’s well done and unlikely to make even the most squeamish go squee.