Run-up to Surgery

Your experience in the run-up to surgery and during the procedure itself will vary enormously. So again, I'm just reporting my path.

If you've never had major in-patient surgery, you'll be impressed by the numbers of steps involved: scheduling tests, arranging referrals, and meeting with individuals. You'll need your personal physician's clearance for surgery, including an EKG; you may want to donate blood to yourself (autologous transfusion); you'll need a chest x-ray (inexplicably, a separate referral needed); you'll confer with the anesthesiologist; and you'll likely get involved in a pre-surgical information program. Plus, you'll be advised to buy some necessities to make life easier when you get home.

"Joint Camp" at Easton Hospital is a nice idea: you meet your approximate cohort of victims and you get a briefing and a chance to ask questions. Although if you're reading this blog, you'll probably have done lots of web research, it's still nice to talk to the supervisor for your care, and the physical therapst who you'll be working with. Also, this Jointworks Program has rallied all participating doctors to use similar protocols, simplifying andf streamlining care: this is good, because confusion in a hospital is bad.

One downside is that for the moment and for the next few years, resurfaced hips are still a novelty, and in orientations, in the hospital, in PT, and elsewhere, people give you conventional info and treat you overly conservatively. That's not dangerous, but it does leave you feeling a little underinformed and confused about YOU can and cannot do. The only solution for this is knowledge, and being a squeaky wheel.

Some pieces of advice about the immediate run-up:

I would delay buying the recommended "hip kit" until you see how you're doing and how home care is going. A hip kit is usually a sponge-on-a-stick for washing the lower half of your body, a sock-donner, and a grabber claw. The claw is fun and my sons and I enjoyed clawing things (think "Toy Story"), but so far I have only used it once when I dropped my glasses behind an easy chair, and was home alone. I could bend enough to wash all but my lower left leg, and hell, water was good enough for it, so my sponge-on-stick stayed unused. As for socks, it was summer and I wasn't going anywhere fancy, so a sock device wasn't critical. That said, it can be a little tricky and uncomfortable to get a sock on for the first 3 weeks, but not worth the device, at least for me.

You will probably be urged to use a walker in your recovery (you will be happy to use one at the hospital). I was too vain to be attached to such a device long-run, plus I wanted the greater mobility of crutches, so that's what I opted for. I had my wife bring the crutches to the hospital so that I could work and practice with them during physical therapy.

Either before surgery or while at the hospital you will be helped with arrangements for getting some sort of toilet-seat extender. These devices vary greatly. Without getting into the details, some of these suck, for a variety of reasons. I would wait and see how you are doing at the hospital: if you get resurfacing done, you might not need a higher toilet. In my case, we had happened to renovate our bathrooms recently, and given that everyone in the family was grown and no one is getting younger, we installed ADA-grade toilets that are a bit higher (I think 17 inches). This turned out to be more than fine for me, so I didn't bother bringing in any extra appliances. We also have a shower with only a small tread to step over (i.e., not a tub), and the shower has a separate hand-held unit, so that worked out well, too.

Finally, even though you might begin to feel like you are obsessively hogging attention with all your hip talk and endless blah blah blah about surgery, talk to people about your concerns and fears. I really began to feel spooked: (1) there is some finite chance of dying in all surgery (even if the hip-surgery odds are probably skewed by the traditionally older clientele); (2) even though you need the surgery, it still feels elective, so you are bringing down all these hassles on your family and on yourself, by choice; (3) the outcome is not 100% certain; and (4) somehow compared to past outpatient knee jobs and minor repairs, this surgery felt to me like some kind of life threshold, a gateway to old age and never-ending strings of medical procedures (if you're getting resurfacing done, most members of your cohort are going to be older than you). These are natural reactions and concerns, and your best way of dealing with them is to talk them out.

Once you wake up on the day of surgery, you're heading down the ski jump so things will go fast, and the only elegant way out is forward....