Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Referred Relief



Oooh who wants to learn more hip vocab?! It scares me a little how much of this stuff I've picked up over the last few months, but, you know, the more you know! (dum dum dum DAAAH!) My work with Susan, the Wonder PT, got me familiar with the tensor fasciae and illiotibial tract (aka IT Band, which I believe I've bitched about here before!) because that's where we focused a lot of my ultrasound massage and Kinesio taping. Sorting that got me to strengthening my gluteous minimus, which was in pretty rough shape, having been banged around for months in my wonky joint. Still definitely not as strong as I'd like, but I'm getting there, and have now moved on to the illiopsoas - woohoo!

Dr. Hoo started paying attention to my psoas last week when she asked me to tilt my forehead down a bit while I was laying on my stomach and I immediately had searing lower back pain. She had me lie on my back and pressed the heel of her hand against my hip bone while having me lift the opposite leg and try to hold it up against pressure from her other hand. "Your left side is much weaker," she declared (stop the presses, William Randolph Hearst!) and told me she'd need to "take a contact" (NSA terminology for poking me in some manner) halfway between my belly button and hip bone. Thankfully I've become fairly unconcerned about medical professionals fiddling in my pelvic region, so it wasn't too uncomfortable, though it was certainly a bizarre sensation.

As you can see from this nifty cross-section diagram, the psoas essentially connect the base of your spine to your legs, wrapping around and running down the inside of the thigh. And they hurt me all the time! THIS is the answer to my question to Dr. Kim ("What exactly is hurting?") that he didn't know how to answer. After my first psoas adjustment last week, I had a lot of soreness on the outside of my leg and in my left bum, which is unusual for me. It did seem to work out some of the pain of the inside of the joint, though, and I felt a bit more stable, though I had a few choice moments of losing joint function altogether, which is NOT unusual, lucky me! After yesterday's adjustment I definitely had weird pangs and stretching, but not the soreness of the last time, and am feeling like my leg is twisting (or UNtwisting, I suppose) from top to bottom. Which is a weird sensation. :) Good, though, and I think getting better today. And instead of referred pain in my knee (always a strange concept, because medically my knee isn't hurting me, but actually it is) I now have referred relief!

In other news, I have a limp. This may not be a surprise to you, but it is to me more often than you might think. A few weeks back I was having a bad (hip) day and felt like I was just taking it a bit slow and measured when I walked into Royal Orchid and the matriarch immediately asked "What happened to your leg?!" I was crestfallen - here I thought I'd been keeping it such a good secret! haha I had a moment yesterday walking (pretty normally, I thought) down the hall at school when I caught my reflection ahead of me and saw what any Joe on the street would - someone obviously favoring their left side. Curses! It's funny how something like this affects your self-consiousness, though - for a long time I've been of the opinion that people think of you whatever they want, regardless, so you might as well be true to yourself and see who can really hang with that, but this whole hip business catapults that theory into the stratosphere. Yes, I have to turn my body fully perpendicular to the car like an old woman in order to get out; yes, I'm 29 and take the elevator up 1 floor to the chiropractor; YES I LIMP HOW DARE YOU JUDGE ME?! hahaha Also very helpful in checking my own assumptions about other people, I tell you what!

It's a beautiful snowy day in Vermont and I'm sad not to be able to run around in it frolicking like in years past, but I've been pretty crafty around the house in my infirmity and haven't gone stir-crazy at all yet, which is nice. We'll see how I'm doing come March. :)

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

ebullient



OH HAPPY DAY!!!!!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

I've got spurs that jingle jangle jingle!

Or perhaps will after tomorrow when I head to sunny Houston Tejasssssss - YEEE-HAW!



hahaha Poor kitty! Anyhow, I'm really excited for Winter Meeting (my third, after Seattle and Tampa), as it should be a fantastic rejuvenating time. I'm more than a bit concerned about being stuck on a plane for 8 hours, since usually the longer I sit the longer it takes for me to get back to ambulatory when I get up. Thankfully we're staying in the hotel that's hosting, and we're right near the Houston Galleria, so we shouldn't have to travel far for work, food, or glorious shopping. The past few days my left hip's been bothering me something fierce, though the pool yesterday seems to have helped. Still and all, I may be packing my handy collapsible cane nonetheless.

At this point I'm a little more concerned about being stranded in an airport or two, since Houston falls squarely into the "ya can't get there from he-ah" category and the only flight there leaves at 6am and the only flight back gets in at midnight. I'm bringing my travel pillow, for sure! Also loaded up my iPod (no small thanks to Christopher, my personal tech support!) with plenty of podcasts (which I didn't even know were free because, you know, I live in a hole) and some Futurama, which Chris keeps telling me is awesome but which I've never actually seen. And I'm bringing sandals. And my swimsuit! I'm sure the Texans will think me mad, but it's not every day you get a full 60 degree increase in temperature! Did I already say yee-haw? :)

Friday, January 9, 2009

THR v. PAO: A Tutorial

AKA What part of Periacetabular Osteotomy do you not understand? :D

I'm not having a hip replacement - let me just get that out of the way. It's a distinction I fear I'm going to be making fairly frequently, though perhaps less thanks to this handy dandy post!

This (in case you didn't know) is your hip (or, one's hip - you may have a hip of an entirely different stripe in your body and just not know it yet!):



A Total Hip Replacement (THR to its friends) replaces both the femoral head and the lining of the acetabular (socket) with prosthetics, whereas my own beloved/befeared PAO uses my own bits to correct the acetabular misalignment. I can do a killer fist-in-cupped-hand demonstration of this correction for those of you who are interested. :)

Basically my socket doesn't cover enough of the ball to prevent my hip from wobbling around all willy-nilly like an inebriated penguin, so Dr. Kim will make 3 cuts (probably with some scary saw, but let's not think about that!) thusly (full disclosure: I've never seen that pic before and it caused me to make a bad frowny face and go "Oh. My. God." *shudder*) and realign the piece such that it provides full coverage for the ball. It's called a joint preserving technique because it uses my own bone, cartilage, tissues and whatnot (I believe that's the medical term) to essentially recreate the joint. As such, I'll likely have as much, if not more, time left on the joint as I would with a THR, but without the restrictions a THR poses and without the need to replace the replacement as it wears out. Of course, my own joint very probably will wear out over time anyway, but it seems much more reasonable to have a hip replacement at 50 or 60 than at 29. Not to mention that by that time who knows what joint replacement technology will look like. *sings Kool Keith "mechanical legs, mechanical legs"!*

Of course, because the PAO slices right through bone and all the muscles I've been working so hard at building up, the recovery time is pretty astronomical, especially compared to the THR. As such, I'll be hospitalized for up to a week, then home and fairly low-functioning for at least a few more, all the while (ideally) on crutches, which I'll have probably up to my 12-week post-op check-up (yeah triple dash!) before getting down to a cane, recovery permitting. And, to be honest, there's a lot of shit that can go wrong, my biggest fears being nerve damage and blood clots. Oh, and it not working. ha! THAT would suck!

But so it's good I have all this time to prep, to get in better shape and deal with my Vitamin D deficiency and my slightly high cholesterol and my... uh... lack of an iPod? I'm better prepared for my surgery (5 months from tomorrow!) with each passing day!

And now so are you. :)

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

HEEEAAADDD, shoulders, hips and sacrum,

HIPS AND SACRUM!

hahaha Oh man, it's a good thing I have such a deep appreciation for the absurd, else I surely would have lost my mind long ago.

Well! It's been just ages since I've posted here, though I suppose nothing particularly noteworthy has occurred in my pelvic region in that time, for better or worse. Yesterday was my first time in the pool in 2 weeks, because of all the holiday madness, and I was a little nervous, but did smashingly. I've had 3 or 4 adjustments in the interim and can really feel the difference in my shoulders when I do upperbody stuff. Did I mention I'm getting jacked? :)

I also realized recently that I regularly use "jacked" in 2 completely different ways - to mean both getting stronger (see above) and hurting (as in "I totally jacked my back") - but at this point I guess that's the least of my worries!

Anyway, so for probably the last month or so I've been compelled to stretch all the time, especially when I go to bed at night - a common effect, I gather, of NSA. I never thought much before about the relationship between my shoulders and my hips, but I'm more and more aware of it these days, in no small part because my left shoulder is, well, jacked! Yeah, and I apparently had no idea how badly. Dr. Hoo keeps telling me to be patient with it but it's been WEEKS now and it's still not quite right. I've made some incredible progress, though, not the least of which is movement in parts of my back I didn't know actually could move, and I'm very thankful for it.

And aside from too much uninterrupted standing on New Years Eve, ol' leftie's been doing pretty well lately, and I didn't come out of the pool yesterday shaking like I did after my last break from it (though admittedly that was way back in weak old July!). Turning over to 2009 has gotten me all the more amped up in my surgery prep/countdown (which is nearly to 5 months now, for those keeping track) and, though sadly Sandy Claus did not bring me Millennial Crutches this year, I did get a 120 gig iPod that should keep me nicely occupied during my infirmity. Oh, it's fantastic!



A happy new year to you all from me, a pig, and this drunken gnome-like fellow!