THR I'm New and Hurting!

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mccoyniac

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Good afternoon. I am new here. I had a THR 6 weeks ago, and I cannot put weight on my leg without extreme pain after attempting to walk. I feel like I am being a wimp, but I am almost to the point of tears at times. I was put on the cane at 3 weeks. I do real well with therapy. The pain only occurs after I have been walking for any length of time. My Dr.'s office said that it was more than likely my back, even though the pain shoots down the bone and the deep achiness is all over my leg and in the inner thigh. The PT was so much more helpful. He said the more active I get, the more pain I will have, which is why I should increase the pain meds until I am able to cope with the extra weight on my bad leg. I am almost really to the point of wishing I had never done this. I have seen videos of people walking normally at 5-6 weeks or before, and one of them was significantly older than I am! I am 59 years old. I am so looking forward to getting to know some of you with similar problems.
Thank you,
Candy
 
Candy,
Sorry to hear about the pain you are suffering:(.......if this surgery has one message, it's that we all recover at different rates. I know it's not a comfort but hopefully Jo or some one with a little medical background will be on shortly. Wishing you the best, it will get better!
Dee
 
Hi Candy,
Unfortunately I have not yet gone thru my LTH yet, but having had major hip surgery, I can say that no 2 hip patient, even each surgery will health the same or at the same rate. What is "typical" for rate of recovery might be different for you, and I would recommend taking it easy and slow, and try to stay as positive as much as you can. Make sure to talk to your doctor as well.
 
Welcome to Bonesmart! You've come to the right place, but I am sorry that you're in pain.

PolarIce is absolutely right that different people (or even different hips in the same person) heal at different rates. It's just not helpful to compare yourself to other people. They aren't you and everyone is different.

I agree with your PT's cooments about pain medication. Many people do experience an increase in pain as they become more active. Plus, you are still relatively newly out of surgery and it is important to medicate your post-op pain
 
Hi Candy and welcome to BoneSmart.

First of all, you are not a wimp! So get that out of your mind straight away!

I would also say reduce your activity as well as increase your pain meds.

I would like to have a little more detail if you wouldn't mind:
1. how much activity are you doing right now? Like exercises, walking, housework, meal prep, cleaning, laundry, etc.
2. how much time do you actually spend on your feet as opposed to resting with your feet up?
3. what pain meds are you taking, how much and how often?
4. are you back at work or planning to go back to work yet?
 
Hi, mccoyniac...welcome to the forum. I'm so glad you found your way to our BoneSmart family. We're here to help and support you.

I'm sorry to hear you are hurting. My first thought was that you were trying to do too much for this stage of your recovery and that you may not be adequately medicating for your pain. Remember that YOUR recovery is unique to you and it cannot and should not be compared to anyone else's.

Josephine's questions are pertinent, so it would be helpful if you could provide that additional information.

I look forward to hearing more from you!
 
How are you doing? I hope you have gotten the pain under control and that you are taking baby steps. I do know at times it can be so :hairpulling:but you still have surport and we would like to hear from you. Take care. :doggieshmooze:Tashia:loll:
 
Hi Candy

Welcome aboard the hippie forum so sorry to hear about your problems but if you can get back to Jo with some of the questions she has asked then she might be able to give you some much needed advise.

Billy
 
Hallo, Candy,

I think that you, like me, have become a victim of a good deal of misinformation. My boneman, wishing no doubt to encourage me, said that after the operation I would be able to do anything that I had been able to do before. The only problem was that he forgot to say how very many months it would take for me to be able to do them. At the last count it was 14 months and I am still waiting for some of them, but to be fair to the gentleman, who has been excellent throughout, little by little I have been able to pick up on most of the ordinary things that my poorly hip had been refusing me for months and years beforehand.

So all I can do is to direct you to the thread, "staffsknot story so far", where you will be able to read about early, middle and late progress. You will find that we had some points in common, and others that were different. I got some early and timely help from Josephine, Jaycey and Jamie, mostly to the effect that I was expecting too much too early and that I should rein back on some of the activities. This I tried to do.

The trouble is that we active people are fools to ourselves as the saying is. We know what the eventual outcome needs to be, but we find it tricky to find the babysteps, the stepping stones that lead to where we want to go. For example, when Boneman said I would be able to do speed walking, I thought he meant straightaway and walked 2 miles in 40 minutes including a steep hill, after three weeks. Ouch, ooer, help! and a big bunch of expletives. I didn't know where hurt me most. My right thigh had been filleted and the bone replaced with rusty barbed wire. I was in despair.

The reasonable voices on Bonesmart saved me from a lot of physical and mental discomfort. I think it could be the same for you.

Here are some rules I found useful. They may work for you and they may not. Maybe have a think about them.

1) If an activity hurts, stop doing it for a time, and then restart from a lower base.
2) Never increase a single effort or a week's total effort by more than a very small percentage, say 5% - 10%. This is hard to calculate, but you know what I mean.
3) Don't despair. A setback is just a setback. It isn't the end of your world.
4) Try to find physical activities that don't challenge your repaired bits too directly. My own salvation was swimming, freestyle, not breaststroke, not yet anyway.
5) Tune out from people who know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else who played a full 18 hole round of golf after 4 weeks. They are talking out of a bit of their anatomy that wasn't designed for talking.
6) It is not a good idea to listen to advice from the likes of me.

All the very best. I hope things improve for you soon.

Alan
 
:goodpost: :I-Agree:

Candy,

I agree with Alan (Staffsknot) above for every item except #6 above. Listen to Alan.

He has a great way of sharing wisdom that is very real and compelling.

And what is really nice, is that even tho he has only experienced his experience, I think it ends up being accurate for the vast majority if not all of us. I wish I had written his eloquent post...but I didn't..he did.

He's a wise man...

Z
 
Recovery should be tough but not painful. i am concerned about the PT comments that the more active you get the more pain you will have. You are only 6 weeks out of surgery. The body needs time to recover. i am also curious to hear the answers to Jo's questions. Are you trying to do too much. Are you giving your body enough rest time. Remember the BoneSmart motto for recovery less pain more gain. i was still sore and hurting at 4 weeks after my knee scope and that was nothing compared to what you have gone through. Relax and listen to your hip. If you try to push yourself to hard to soon you can actually slow down your recovery. Will keep you in my prayers that things get better
 
5) Tune out from people who know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else who played a full 18 hole round of golf after 4 weeks. They are talking out of a bit of their anatomy that wasn't designed for talking.
Alan
:rofllol:don't we all know people who are so full of advise and so willing to share it even though they have no first hand knowledge or experience. I love the way your pharased it too

6) It is not a good idea to listen to advice from the likes of me.
Alan
The only bad advise I saw in the whole post
 
Hi Candy,
Welcome to Bonesmart, First let me say that you should have comfort in knowing that almost everyone if not everyone here knows what your going through. I am sorry for your pain. Everyone here is very helpful,they have excellent opinions and advice. Second, no two people will recover at the same pace there are simply to many variables to take into account. For Example, Age, Weight, Activity, Smoker or a nonsmoker, and pain tolerance just to name a few. Third, your pain medication is very important. Pain management is crucial there are those of us that have been on pain medication for quite some time. I took pain medication today and I had my hip replaced in June, but everyones situation is different. Know that your not alone, try not to panic, baby steps first. The Bonesmart group is fantastic, they will be here to help and support you through it all. Troy
 
Hi Candy,
So sorry to hear of the painful and frustrating time you are having. In the early weeks it is so difficult to balance patience with the desire to get back to our normal selves. I believe that you have already gotten a lot of good advice encouraging you to be more kind to yourself, to re-assess both your activity level and medication use. I generally agree that maybe at 6 weeks you are wishing for more than you are ready for and that perhaps taking one step back will allow you to more easily take two steps forward in the near future. I hope that you also follow Jo's advice and give her some additional info on what has been going on. Sometimes we talk about pain from the hip, but the actual source of the pain can be from somewhere else. Obviously, the hip is at the center of things, but for some working out the kinks begins with the hip, for others it's the calf or the foot or the back. I hope that between your PT, OS and Josephine you can figure out what is underlying your pain and get some real relief.
 
Second, no two people will recover at the same pace
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth! :thumb:
there are simply too many variables to take into account. For Example, Age, Weight, Activity, Smoker or a nonsmoker .... just to name a few.
Not actually true. Studies have shown that none of these have very much effect on overall recovery. Smoking might affect the immediate recovery from the anaesthetic but other than that, age, weight and pre-op activity don't affect anything much.
 
Thank you everyone, for your resonses. They have helped me feel much better about things, although I am still suffering from depression.
Josephine, I will try to answer your questions. I am doing the exercises that I learned during physical therapy, and tomorrow I start outpatient therapy. I had been having someone come to the house, but I was doing so well that the insurance won't continue to pay.I think it was helping me immensely and feel that it ended way too soon. I have been getting out and about and have been doing light housework, but have not done anything like walk around the stores, or take a walk in my neighborhood. I suppose you could say that I spend more time resting with my feet up than I actually do on my feet because of the pain. I am taking Percocet but only have one pill left and they have switched me to Vicodin. I am scheduled to go back to work March 14th, and I honestly don't know how I am going to cope. I have tried taking a few steps without the cane, but the pain and the fear of the pain is just overwhelming. I hope I am understanding this forum correctly, and that you will all receive my responses, and connect it with my previous post here. I am so glad that I found this site, and thank you immensely for all of the responses I have gotten so far.
I am still on the cane, and seem to be getting stiffer by the day. Needless to say, I am quite anxious about the medication change, and the change in therapy, along with going back to work the 15th. I downloaded some hip replacement books to my Kindle. I really hadn;t read up on the surgery before I had it done, and now that I feel as though I am having problems, I decided to learn whatever I can.
I also want to mention that the area of the incision feels very tight and uncomfortable, almost like it is swollen.
Hope to hear from all of you again, and have a great day!
Candy
 
Hi there Candy, just adding my support to the others on the forum.

I know that Jo is on the case and will provide some really good advice. As I am no professional all I can say is hang in there, try and stay calm, work through the options and everything will turn out ok in the end.

I'm thinking of you... as are the rest of us.
 
Candy, I am so sorry that you are having such difficulties right now. There are plenty of people using canes at 6 weeks post-op and longer so please don't feel as if you have to stop using it by a certain time. Did this pain only start when you switched over to the cane? Were you comfortable walking with crutches or a walker?

I'm glad you're going for outpatient PT tomorrow as they will do an evaluation of you and might be able to provide some insight as to what the problem might be. Please let us know how that goes.
 
Hello and Welcome to Bonesmart Candy!

Very sorry you are having to deal with pain in your hip. You really are at a very early stage in your recovery 6 weeks. Plus its impossible to compare to others we all heal so differently. On your cane dont worry about using, i just started to not use mine and Im 14 weeks post surgery. The cane offers stability and confidence.

Im sure Josephine will be back with some advice.

Sending you lots of good wishes!

Sarah
 
I just read another thread here about a lady that has similar pain to mine, and someone said it could be a crack near the stem....could that show up on an xray? Also advice was given not to put weight on the leg. Now I am concerned that I may have the same problem and shouldn't be attempting to walk without the walker. The pain I experience is not constant, but I find my self tensing up when I walk with the cane because I never know when the next step will be painful. I had my surgery 7 weeks ago and can do all of the exercises with no pain. I might also add that my surgery was "uncemented" and I heard that type takes longer to heal because the tissue has to grow up around the femoral head, and to limit activity for 3 months. I am getting more confused by the day, but now extremely worried about a possible crack.
Candy
 
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