Hippage

 

"North Esker Trail - Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary - Ipswich MA"

Canon G7x Mark II

Lightroom

Silver Efex

Yesterday was the first long-ish walk after nearly splitting my head open in Ravenswood Park. I wanted to test out my good, un-operated-on hip to see if it could take the exertion. It's been painful since the Ravenswood jaunt - enough so that I got imaging done on it to see what's what..  The "good" hip did ok mostly although the walk was not pain-free.. I can't tell (yet) whether the pain is soft-tissue based or if it's the joint itself.  The x-ray showed a good news / bad news view of the hips. On the good news side of the ledger, the hip with the titanium joint showed only mild deterioration despite being 14 years old. The bad news is the "good" hip - the un-operated-on hip - showed severe deterioration and significant narrowing in the spaces between the hip bone and the head of the femur.  So - I contacted my PCP and asked for an ortho cutter recommendation. This time around I want a minimally invasive, anterior approach to what amounts to carpentry on this broken-down body..  The anterior approach yields less trauma to the surrounding soft tissue as well as unrestricted movement post-surgery.. A minimally invasive approach should yield a lower risk of infection.. The first hip replacement I had done in 2010/2011 resulted in a galloping deep infection in the joint which necessitated a redo operation and then a year of antibiotics (seven weeks of which was at-home IV antibiotics..).  Besides dying of infection - my other concern is the cost of the procedure.. I seem to recall that the first one cost me ~ $7000.00 out of pocket.. That was 14 years ago though.. when my then-shitty medical benefits from JBAC were way better than the now-shitty Medicare benefits..  I'm sure it will be several hundred percent more expensive this time around.

 

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