BE HEALED

So, surgery went well I think. It's 7 days later and I am hobbling around pretty well without a crutch, though I still take one while walking to the subway and for longer trips.  I took last Tuesday through Friday off of work, expending some of my 42 remaining sick days.  An easy decision to make.  I had initially intended to go in to work on Friday, and probably could have managed it except for one critical oversight: poop.

I learned a valuable lesson in medicine this past week.  Opiates jam your shit up, very literally.  Since getting a drink of water was a pain, and going to the bathroom a bigger one, I didn't drink enough liquids on Wednesday or Thursday.  Also, I was enjoying the prescription of Vicodin that I was on, and the liberal instructions allowed me as many as 8 of those babies within 24 hours.  Well, as it turns out, that was dumb.  Friday morning I found that I had to take a poop but couldn't.  Not just a little constipated, but seriously impacted.  I've always had a pretty speedy digestive system, and this worked to my disadvantage this past week.  I spent the better part of the day on the toilet heaving and screaming and the like.  Look up "impacted stool remedy" and you'll get an idea of how things went.  I tried everything that they suggest on the websites and eventually succeeded to a degree, but gave myself a painful hernia in the process. Nice. The whole time I was sitting on the toilet I was paranoid that I was going to a) explode and b) wreck my surgery.  The one strict doctor's order was not to raise my leg to 90 degrees or greater if I could possibly help it.  I defy anyone to squeeze out a frozen cliff bar of poo with your legs at an obtuse angle.  Can't be done.

As for the surgery, I was in at 5 in the morning for pre-operation prep, was drugged up around 7 and was out of the operating room around 7:50 when I woke up to some paralyzed legs and a cozy hospital gown with heater built in.

It took about 6 more hours for the spinal anesthetic to wear off and for me to be able to move my toes again. Once that happened I was encouraged to see if I could move, pee and be on my way.  I still can't believe that i was able to walk out of the hospital some 9 hours after surgery.  Granted, I had crutches, and wan't particularly comfy at that point, but given that I'd just had hip surgery, doing pretty good.

What appeared in the MRI last month to be a torn labrum, actually ended up being a knob of cartilage on the ball of my hip and a matching cyst on the labrum.  Whenever I would bring my leg up to a seated angle, the knob of cartilage would bump into the labrum and throw my hip out of alignment.  This is certainly consistent with what I felt; it seemed as if I had a small gummy bear jammed in my hip joint whenever it moved.  Dr. Parvisi excised the nubbin and the cyst and put me back together.  I am supposed to let 'pain be my guide' and can start riding my bike as soon as tomorrow, if all goes well.  I'm going to make a test ride later this evening and we'll see how it goes.  Whee!