United States
Hi, I've gotten a lot out of reading the threads in this forum and wanted to share my story.
A year and a half ago I went through the agony of a broken hip following an assault while on a business trip in the UK (I live in the US). It turned out I had a fractured acetabulum (hip socket) though a misdiagnosis by the emergency room doctor at the hospital I was brought to made the injury much, much worse as I was discharged with a pair of crutches and a couple of aspirin. As a result, I was walking around on a broken hip for 12 days (a definite no-no, as any real orthopedic doctor will tell you!). By the time I got back to the States, the hip was essentially shattered. It took a nine hour operation by a trauma surgeon to piece it back together again with an ORIF -- he put in multiple plates and a dozen screws. I was in hospital for 10 days, followed by a week at a rehab clinic, and I was non-weight bearing for almost three months afterwards while it healed.
Nine months later, despite having done my physical therapy exercises religiously (I went two or three times a week and followed their instructions to a T), I still needed a cane to get around and was still in severe pain. Even though the repair held together nicely, arthritis had set in and apparently (as I found out later) there was also significant scar tissue and extra (heterotropic) bone growth, all of which severely limited my ability to function. I could not sleep without prescription painkillers and could barely move at all. Because it was my right hip that was injured, driving was especially difficult and painful.
My surgeon delivered what I saw as extremely bad news at the time: if I wanted to get my life back, I had to undergo a second surgery: a THR. He tried to put a positive spin on it: what I had, he said, was equivalent to "a rusty hinge." The good news was that the hinge could be replaced.
I was devastated. The first surgery had taken so much out of me, and it seemed as if it had caused as many problems as it had solved. But it appeared that I really had no alternative if I ever wanted to lead a "normal" life again.
Although I liked the surgeon who had done my ORIF, I did not care for the hospital he operated out of (serious nursing issues), and in any event he himself did not do THR. I began doing a lot of research, and decided to have the THR at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. I had read a lot of good things about the anterior approach and asked if my THR could be done that way, but unfortunately the surgeons I consulted with all felt it was not appropriate in my case because the ORIF had been done via the posterior approach. Interestingly, some of them wanted to leave in the existing hardware, while others wanted to remove it during the THR. Ultimately I decided to have one of the revision specialists at HSS do the surgery. He leaned towards leaving the hardware in, though he said he'd make the final decision during the surgery itself, while he could "see first hand what was going on in there." I really liked his thinking and his thoroughness, and I felt quite confident in his abilities.
It took quite a while before CT scans and blood tests showed that there was sufficient bone healing to do the THR, but finally I was admitted to HSS in October, 2013 -- nearly a year after the original injury. (I should stress that I continued physical therapy in the months leading up to the operation to keep the muscles as limber as possible -- advice I had gotten from my original surgeon).
Post to be continued...
A year and a half ago I went through the agony of a broken hip following an assault while on a business trip in the UK (I live in the US). It turned out I had a fractured acetabulum (hip socket) though a misdiagnosis by the emergency room doctor at the hospital I was brought to made the injury much, much worse as I was discharged with a pair of crutches and a couple of aspirin. As a result, I was walking around on a broken hip for 12 days (a definite no-no, as any real orthopedic doctor will tell you!). By the time I got back to the States, the hip was essentially shattered. It took a nine hour operation by a trauma surgeon to piece it back together again with an ORIF -- he put in multiple plates and a dozen screws. I was in hospital for 10 days, followed by a week at a rehab clinic, and I was non-weight bearing for almost three months afterwards while it healed.
Nine months later, despite having done my physical therapy exercises religiously (I went two or three times a week and followed their instructions to a T), I still needed a cane to get around and was still in severe pain. Even though the repair held together nicely, arthritis had set in and apparently (as I found out later) there was also significant scar tissue and extra (heterotropic) bone growth, all of which severely limited my ability to function. I could not sleep without prescription painkillers and could barely move at all. Because it was my right hip that was injured, driving was especially difficult and painful.
My surgeon delivered what I saw as extremely bad news at the time: if I wanted to get my life back, I had to undergo a second surgery: a THR. He tried to put a positive spin on it: what I had, he said, was equivalent to "a rusty hinge." The good news was that the hinge could be replaced.
I was devastated. The first surgery had taken so much out of me, and it seemed as if it had caused as many problems as it had solved. But it appeared that I really had no alternative if I ever wanted to lead a "normal" life again.
Although I liked the surgeon who had done my ORIF, I did not care for the hospital he operated out of (serious nursing issues), and in any event he himself did not do THR. I began doing a lot of research, and decided to have the THR at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. I had read a lot of good things about the anterior approach and asked if my THR could be done that way, but unfortunately the surgeons I consulted with all felt it was not appropriate in my case because the ORIF had been done via the posterior approach. Interestingly, some of them wanted to leave in the existing hardware, while others wanted to remove it during the THR. Ultimately I decided to have one of the revision specialists at HSS do the surgery. He leaned towards leaving the hardware in, though he said he'd make the final decision during the surgery itself, while he could "see first hand what was going on in there." I really liked his thinking and his thoroughness, and I felt quite confident in his abilities.
It took quite a while before CT scans and blood tests showed that there was sufficient bone healing to do the THR, but finally I was admitted to HSS in October, 2013 -- nearly a year after the original injury. (I should stress that I continued physical therapy in the months leading up to the operation to keep the muscles as limber as possible -- advice I had gotten from my original surgeon).
Post to be continued...
