Six Week Visit

Today I saw my surgeon for my six week post-op visit. Technically six weeks is tomorrow, but close enough. I had some new scans taken to get an idea as to how my pelvis has been healing. After looking over things, I don't have quite enough bone healing to progress any weight bearing. The correction that my surgeon made was on the larger side, so that means that there is more surface area of bone that needs to heal and grow in. There is already some bone growth going on, just not enough to support weight bearing exercises at this time.

The plan is to assess my progress over the next two weeks and I will likely be able to slowly start weight bearing at week 8 post-op. This process will start slowly, and I'll do so with my physical therapist. Hopefully over the corse of a month I can slowly progress the amount of weight through my right leg. The goal is that by around week 12 or 13 I will be getting around fairly well.

I will continue with water therapy for the next several weeks (at the very least for the next two weeks). As I can bear more weight I will transition to land therapy more. I'm mainly using my SmartCrutches and trying to stay out of the wheelchair as much as possible. I left the wheelchair at home for my appointment today! Using crutches is doable for smaller trips, but I still need to be cautious of my left leg and my shoulder to avoid any other injury. The SmartCrutches take a lot of the stress off of my shoulders so I'm able to do more with them then I would be traditional crutches or walkers.

Walking & Popping

Day three of walking and things are looking good. I'm not have much pain at all, and if I do it's not from my IT band (z-plasty) but from my actual hip joint it's self.

Let me explain my "popping" for a second.

My hip problems consists of two different kinds of popping. The first is the IT band, when it slips over my hip (greater-trochanter; lateral side of the hip). I refer to this as "my hip popping out." The second is when my actual hip joint pops. It never actually pops out, like a dislocation. The best way to describe it is as a clunk, you can hear it and I can defiantly feel it. The z-plasty of the IT Band was to fix "my hip popping out", the scope may or may not fix the hip joint clunk.

With that said, my right (operative side) hip doesn't seem to be popping out now (IT band), but then again I try to avoid letting that happen because it would be very soar. It feels like it isn't going to do that anymore, meaning the surgery was successful, but it's still a little too early to say for sure. Right now the only popping I'm having in that hip is the clunk of my hip joint. It's hard to tell if it is better, worse, or the same as it was pre-op. My surgeon said at this point you just have to wait and see how the scope part of things heals. He said a lot of the time patients experience popping and other things post-op and by about 4 months later they all go away. He couldn't say for sure if the popping I'm having now will go away then, we'll just have to wait and see.

As you can imagine, when my hip joint pops (the clunk) I have more pain since it's newly operated on and things are still sore. Other than that I'm really doing remarkably well. My walking feel almost like normal. I even have to make sure I hold back a little bit since I'm not 100% yet and so that I don't increase my pain; pain is my guide.