Replace, Wince, Repeat
How I cast off my bum right hip, then did it again
About three years ago, I was pushing 50, and 50 was pushing back—hard. I kept the wolves of age at bay by playing Ultimate Frisbee, a field sport and team sport so mentally compelling that you don't notice how hard you're running, which is pretty much all out, all the time. At my age, in this sport, you get used to nagging injuries: You just pop a couple of ibuprofens and get back in the game.
For more than a year, I thought that one such injury was just a groin pull that stubbornly would not heal. To cling so long to such a fantasy requires a fair amount of denial, and mine lasted right up until late one Sunday afternoon when I walked off the field and a teammate said, "Whoa, J.V., man, you're really limping."
"I know I'm limping!" I barked. Then I uttered an expletive inappropriate to both that context and this.
The next week, I finally had my hip X-rayed. Even to my layman's eye, the problem was obvious: After 30 years of Ultimate-induced abuse, the cartilage in my right hip had worn away. The femur and pelvic bone were grinding against each other in an osteoarthritic duet my doc described as "bone-on-bone action."
Now, the thing about osteoarthritis is that it never heals. The joint just keeps degrading to the point where you can't walk, climb stairs, or even tie your shoes without getting these stabbing pains, as if you were Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man and your hip was Laurence Olivier with a dentist's drill, asking, "Is it safe?"
I could have coped without walking, climbing stairs, or tying shoes—these things are trivial—but down this path I would also have to give up playing Ultimate, and that just didn't work for me. I've always planned to die playing Ultimate, and how can I do that if I can't play? So I defaulted to Plan B: hip replacement surgery. Under the knife I went.
With due diligence, of course. I researched the latest techniques on the Internet—I even watched an operation in streaming video, which nearly put me off my conviction (and lunch). I contacted the best hip doctor I could find and made arrangements with the UCLA Medical Center to have my bum hip taken out and a shiny new titanium one installed.
Snip, zip, done. The surgery took 45 minutes, snip to zip. I found this astounding. Hell, I can't change the oil in my car in 45 minutes. But in a world where you can download ring tones of Burl Ives singing "Frosty the Snowman," I suppose nothing is impossible.
Getting out of bed, though. That was impossible. Or so I thought. The day after surgery, through a haze of pain, I obeyed a cheerfully sadistic (aren't they all?) physical therapist and began a sort of Bataan Death March down the hall. Good times. In the following days and weeks of PT, I progressed from walker to crutches to cane to unaided perambulation, and plotted my return to Ultimate. This is where we cue the happy music and fade out, right?
Not so fast.
It turns out that successful hip replacement requires something called "bone ingrowth," where bone and implant fuse as one. In my case, this never happened, so the implant slipped and slid, causing me wincing grief with every stride. Ultimate? Out of the question. Hip replacement replacement? Required.
It took two full years to conclude that bone ingrowth had truly failed and to sort out a strategy for the revision, one involving a larger implant for a tighter fit, an implant additionally coated with something called hydroxyapatite ("which bones love!" the doc avowed).
Now, eight months post-op, I'm walking and running—and playing Ultimate—without pain. The ingrowth took. J.V. happy. Case closed. Except that in airports, my titanium hip triggers security alarms, and I get pulled aside for additional screening. A small enough price to pay for a working hip. I really don't mind setting off metal detectors. It's the ones I don't set off that worry me.
The universe, it is said, doesn't owe us anything but an education, and it gives us lessons every day. Between surgeries, the universe taught me a profound lesson in acceptance, for I had to accept pain, real pain, with every step I took. I didn't like it, but I don't hate having gone through it. The experience left me mentally much tougher. As tough as my right hip, which now, I am quite confident, could kick your hip's ass.
TV writer John Vorhaus is in Bucharest, developing sitcoms for Romania (and bringing Ultimate Frisbee to the Wild East). His blog is at www.somnifer.typepad.com.