Something's Gotta Give

After my daughter was born, part of the placenta remained inside of me. I blame the doctor for this, although apparently this isn't a super rare occurrence; also, my daughter's birth was fairly traumatic, so maybe that's the type of thing you don't notice during a traumatic birth? However, I do still sort of hold it against my doctor that after the birth, when I kept bleeding and bleeding for a month, and when I kept asking him about when the bleeding would stop, he pretty much blew me off, telling me that it would stop eventually. It did stop eventually, but only after a night of me losing about five bowlfuls of blood and then having an emergency D&C (which the doctor referred to as a 'dusting and cleaning') four days before Christmas. If there is one thing I learned from this experience, it's that when I speak to doctors about things that concern me, I need to exaggerate, because apparently I tend to understate my conditions. My doctor did ask me a few times prior to my massive hemorrhage how much blood I was losing on a daily basis - a little or a lot? I said somewhere in between. But what does that even mean - 'a little' or 'a lot'?! And obviously it was too much, which is what my gut was telling me, but this was my first child, and I also happened to be fatigued from, well, having a newborn, so I didn't know any better.

Now if I'm asked what my pain is, on a scale from 1-10, I always take what I'm thinking in my mind and add 2. I mean, even if I'm not in AGONY, if I'm in the doctor's office at all in the first place, it means I think I need help. Unfortunately, it seems like you have to say your pain is, like, an 8 or 9 before people think it's significant. But it's subjective. I had a friend in college who screamed when I gave her a massage because apparently the squeezing of my hands inflicted a massive amount of pain on her. Is her '8' on a pain scale the same as my '8' when it comes to a medical need?

At any rate, in the case of my D&C, which actually stands for Dilation and Curettage, which is a euphemism for scraping the inside of the uterus, it was a medical emergency, and it had to happen. I didn't have to sit around and contemplate, 'Gee, do I really want to have the inside of my uterus scraped off?' Unless I wanted to bleed to death, which believe me I did not, it was a medical necessity. And so it happened without question.

It has been very different dealing with a non-medical emergency like a torn labrum, especially since with this condition you may have a number of days where you feel very good, and cortisone injections can offer significant relief. It's not as if you just fall over one day and are like HELP, I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T GET UP! and are told you will never walk again unless you have hip surgery. Which is why, even as I sit here three weeks post-surgery, I can't believe I actually decided to go through with this. Why would anyone in their right mind put themselves on crutches for 4+ weeks to get rid of a little stinking hip pain?!

But, I think there was a defining moment in my decision to do this. In my mind, it is categorized under the day of The Hike. I had a cortisone injection on June 5th, and a few days later my brother and his family came to visit (a different brother than the one who came during my actual recovery from surgery). This brother and his family are very into hardcore outdoorsy stuff and so of course wanted to do a bunch of hardcore outdoorsy stuff. I'm not so into hardcore outdoorsy stuff - I like outdoorsy stuff, just not hardcore, lol - and I REFUSE to camp. I grew up camping, so I joke that my childhood camping was enough to last for one lifetime. So my brother and his family took my daughter on a hiking and camping trip for a few days, and I agreed to meet them with my two-year-old son on the last day of the trip. We planned to go on a short hike and then have a picnic lunch, which my son and I brought up with us. I briefly mentioned my hip issues to my brother, but I didn't dwell on it because I figured that with four kids, ages 2, 4, and 8 (x 2), we weren't going to be doing a hike that I wouldn't be able to handle.

Oh, but I was soooo wrong. The trail my brother chose was not long, but it was very steep and uneven, which was very, very bad for my hip. Also, the trail was very narrow and slippery due to pine needles everywhere. My two-year-old kept slipping, and I was worried he was going to fall and take a tumble down the side of the mountain, so I kept getting myself into awkward positions trying to hold his hand and guide him. Furthermore, over half the time, the kids decided they wanted to go off the trail and climb on the rocks, and of course my son had to do everything everyone else was doing, and I had to follow him. This shouldn't have been a big deal, but the hike and especially the rock climbing, resulted in a lot of pain for me, and I was in one very very big bad foul scary mood by the end.

At the time, I think my bad mood was mostly centered around the pain I was feeling and my irritation over the fact that my brother had chosen possibly The Worst Hike Ever for my hip. Of course, in retrospect, how was he supposed to know just how much my hip had been bothering me? Like I mentioned before, I tend to understate things, and that in itself is probably an understatement. Plus, I really don't think that even I was prepared for how bad a two-mile hike with a bunch of kids could possibly hurt. After all, I was about a week post-cortisone injection, and up until that point I had been feeling pretty good.

Due to my insane foul mood by the end of the hike, I wanted to go home immediately after eating lunch. So I packed my son into the car and we headed out. He screamed for the first 45 minutes because he mad about leaving, then fell asleep right as we were getting back into town. By the time we got home, it was his nap time anyway, so I thought I could gently lift him out of his car seat and carry him up to his room. However, as I tried to lift him out of his car seat, I felt an absolute surge of pain shoot through my hip - 8 or 9 on the pain scale, and that's not even with my usual +2. It totally caught me by surprise, and think I sort of gasped and stood back, then tried again at a slightly different angle. Same result. I went at it a few more times, trying to lift him onto my left side rather than my right, and then eventually sat back down in the car with this bewildered feeling of OMG I cannot get my son out of the car! Defeated, I reclined my seat and took a snooze with him. In the car. In the alley. Where all the homeless people roam, looking through recycle bins for aluminum cans.

I know there were a lot of things that went into my decision, but I think this day was what, in the end, pushed me over the edge. I don't even know if I knew it at the time, but not being able to handle a short little hike with a few scrambles up some rocks, and then to not be able to get my son out of his stinking car seat without risking passing out from pain, left a pretty deep impression on me. And this was a little over one week post-cortisone injection, which meant my hip was probably as good as it was going to get without more drastic measures. It was, perhaps, the equivalent of my life-threatening bleed. Because somewhere inside me, I think I was it definitely set off a little voice that kept telling me, Something's gotta give.