Front porch: New hip comes with life lessons

If the numbers hold – which they may not because of the pause in elective surgeries last spring and this fall due to COVID-19 – some 400,000 people in America will have had total hip replacement surgery by the end of this year. I am one of them.

This is not exactly startling or even major news, what with all that’s going on in the world, but it is for me. I avoid surgery like poison. I avoided it so long that by the time I got to the operating room in November, just before the latest shutdown, I was a bit of a mess.

But here I am now, moving with a kind of (relative) grace I thought was lost to me, sleeping without pain waking me during the night and steadier on my feet than I probably have a right to be. And I’m still in the early weeks of recovery, with more good (I hope) things on the horizon, hipwise, if I stick to my physical therapy and exercise routine – which I am embracing fully.

As so many of my friends who have had this done before me said, “My first question was why didn’t I do this sooner.” I hear you, sisters. Finally. They have welcomed me to their club of hipsters.

I am a woman in my 70s who has other issues that affect my balance, orthopedic and otherwise, so I’m likely not going to be doing Bloomsday or any serious hiking on uneven ground. But walking through a grocery store without having to hold on to a cart, going out for a walk with my husband without wincing, doing stairs without a death grip on the banister (a light touch will suffice) and all those simple movements in and through life – well, that will be bliss.

So that’s the first of four lessons I’ve learned. If your doctor recommends the surgery, if at all possible, seriously consider it, sooner rather than later.

I started this whole business 20 years ago, when I saw my first orthopedic surgeon for my left knee. Worn meniscus cartilage, bone-on-bone, arthritis. Tried injections for a while, discussed and rejected replacement surgery, and got on with life taking acetaminophen, lots of it.

I don’t do surgery well. I’ve had a few, and it’s anesthesia and brain fog and feeling on-and-off stoned for a month that puts me off. For me, control of my brain function is everything. We all have our “things,” I suppose, and that one is mine.

Then my other knee got a little wonky. Then my left hip, then my right one. Acetaminophen and CBD oil kept on top of most of the collective pain, but I had too many years of misery before my left hip kind of blew up on me.

Second lesson learned: I didn’t realize how much I had actually lost until I started getting things back again. For example, when going to bed, I’d sit on the bed, swing my right leg up, then reach down to pull my left leg up. I didn’t think much about it. But two weeks after surgery, I could swing my left leg up all by its little self.

There are so many movement things that have improved. I hadn’t realized all the workarounds I’d developed to compensate for what I was no longer able to do without pain.

The third lesson is one I seem to keep having to learn over and over again. I got a little cockyoverconfident with that getting-into-bed motion that, on a day when I had made some other advances, I hopped into bed in one motion rather than carefully. Pulled my hip flexor muscle with a sheering pain I couldn’t have imagined existed. That set me back a bit.

The lesson – believe the doctors when they tell you recovery is a marathon not a sprint.

And the final aha revelation is a husband-wife thing. Like probably every other couple in the world, Bruce and I have our own areas of expertise and responsibilities in running the household. A man of many talents, Bruce is, I’m afraid, cooking-impaired. Entering a grocery store is also a deer-in-headlights experience for him, so he pretty much grabs the first thing he sees that seems to be what he was asked to get (I once sent him to buy Cool Whip and he came home with Miracle Whip).

So Bruce had to lead in cooking once our son, Sam, who came over for the first week post-op, had to go back to Seattle. He struggled in the kitchen for a few days, but he did it. I then managed meals with him cleaning up afterward. I had stocked the house pretty well, but there are always fresh things needed or unexpected items that come up, so a friend helped with shopping for a few weeks.

What Bruce and I are now realizing is that we need to do some planning for what may or may not come in the future, when one of us may have to be doing the work that both of us had done. We’ve been doing some things on a macro level for that eventuality, but we’ve come to realize that the details of everyday living need some planning for and practicing now, too. Like managing the other person’s medications. Yes, sometimes you do have to sweat the small stuff.

So, improvement continues, and I rediscover lost functions of parts of myself each day. And as a newly minted hipster – surprisingly, I’m finding myself now turning thoughts to what life might be like with a titanium left knee.

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Stefanie Pettit can be reached at upwindsailor@comcast.net