Four Months Post PAO

Wait, haven't we been here before?

It's funny, I've been wanting to write here again, just because. Not because anyone is really reading, but because I've been writing elsewhere, and writing is so helpful to my mental health. Also, I've had some serious memory issues lately, and my sense of time is distorted. I really appreciate looking back at the things I wrote Once Upon A Time.

I looked at the date today and realized it has been exactly four months since I had my left PAO, so I thought it seemed like a good time to check in here and maybe regain some momentum for blogging. I pulled up blogger, and what do you know, the last time I got an itch to write, I was also four months post-PAO, only from my right side. Maybe it's something about that four month mark that does something to you.

It's hard to believe it has only been four months. I guess that's good, right? In fact, looking back at the events of the past four years, since I started this blog, it's hard to believe they happened so recently. Cancer especially feels like a world away.

When I decided to have my hip fixed in the summer of 2014, I started to read blogs written by people who have bad hips. Then, when I was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2015, I started to read blogs written by people with breast cancer. The vast majority of these blogs are no longer updated or no longer in existence. With hips, I suspect it is because people make a nice recovery and move on. With cancer, I suspect it is mixed. Some people make a nice recovery and move on; others die. I wonder a lot what happens to the people whose blogs just disappear. I don't know if I want to know.

At any rate, I don't want to just disappear. I do hope that I can wrap this up soon, because it was fully intended to be a short, perhaps informative, 'Hey, this was my experience with hip surgery!' blog, along the lines of the ones I read that helped me so much. Instead, it took a different direction. Now, with five out of the six hip surgeries behind me (not counting the one by the nice but incompetent surgeon), I hope, with my fingers crossed, that I can wrap up this chapter of my life soon, and this blog along with it.

I guess a good place to start would be a blow-by-blow description of everything that has happened since the last time I wrote, but that's not going to happen. So here's the short of it.

Suffice it to say, this is a loooooooong recovery process. I ended up having some rather major issues with my right side and not being able to flex my thigh. I worked to overcome that, but still couldn't bend enough to put on my stinking shoe at well over six months post-op, which was highly annoying. My doctor thought it would help if he shaved down some bone, and said he could do it when he took the screws out, so that I wouldn't have to add another surgery onto my seemingly endless string of surgeries. Unfortunately, I am apparently The Slowest Bone Grower he's ever seen, so I had to wait until March for that to happen, because he couldn't take the screws out until my fractures healed more. And then, after he took the screws out, he said it turned out I wasn't as healed as he thought (apparently it is hard to tell on the X-rays because the screws block a lot?), and I ended up on crutches again for another freaking month, which as you can guess, pissed me off quite a bit (me? pissed? never!).

It sent me into this long-lasting funk that was part hissy fit, part depression. To be fair, it was not just over my medical woes, but also work and a bunch of other Isn't life fun? bullshit. Pardon my French. And even though I had been calling his surgery scheduler to schedule my left side for, like, forever, so that I got my top choice of dates (early May, so that I wouldn't have to go back to school on crutches this fall), I ended up canceling those dates because after spending most of March on crutches, I simply couldn't deal.

After all that, I ended up with July surgery dates, just like last summer! Ha! But at the time, it seemed better than having to go through it all again whilst in this huge funk and so soon after getting done with another rather long stint on crutches. And then, as fate would have it, some angel canceled their surgery in early June, so I slid right in and had my left arthroscopic surgery on June 4th and the left PAO on June 11th. It couldn't have worked out any better. Well, actually, it could've worked out better if I'd never had to have this done in the first place, but hey, I'm not bitter at all. Nope.

Anyways. The left side was supposed to be easier because the joint was in better condition to start with. It HAS been easier, but not WAY EASIER like I was expecting. Like, my surgeon told me I'd be able to bear weight much sooner if I didn't have to have microfracture done, which I didn't. But then it turned out he had to make such a big correction (bigger than anticipated) that there was such a huge gap in my pelvis that he wanted me non-weight bearing for six weeks anyway, which as you can guess, pissed me off quite a bit (me? pissed? never!).

But, whatever. Like I said earlier, that seems like forever ago. I'm pretty much over it by now and just ready to be done already. I'm holding out hope that my bones will miraculously grow faster this time around so I can have my screws out before the end of the year (I have high deductible insurance), though I'm pretty resigned to that not happening. What's another 6K in the large scheme of things? It's okay, I AM MADE OF MONEY. No worries, no worries at all.

So here we are. I am still going to PT twice a week and am working half-time, teaching online only. I have absolutely zero medical leave left, but it has been worth it. I am much less stressed than I would otherwise be, and in the past month or so I have started to crawl out of this deep, dark hole I've been living in for I don't know how long. I don't even have tamoxifen to blame, so what blows?

Nevertheless, I persist.