Welcome back to The Hip Replacement Podcast. And you're going to have to excuse me a little bit today, maybe because I've had a lot of caffeine this morning. I'm trying to get rid of it.
I'm drinking a lot of water. I'm trying to be active a little bit more this morning, but I've had a lot of coffee.
My family recently took a trip to Hawaii. And I'm not much of a coffee drinker. But when you're on Hawaii, you have to drink the Hawaiian coffee. And we also went to a coffee farm and bought some beans, some coffee beans, and we brought it back home. And my wife has wanted to make coffee in the morning lately. So, I've been having a little bit, and it's a lot of caffeine for me.
I'm not really a caffeine person or a coffee person, but here we are. I'm going to try to get through this as best I can. So, bear with me.
And going on that trip reminded me of another topic that we can talk about in the future. And that is long flights. How do you get through a long flight with a hip replacement? Or what are some things to think about for a long flight with a hip replacement? We'll talk about that in a different episode.
But anyway, here we are today. Let's do this. All right.
And this is the second year of the podcast, year two of the podcast. And my focus or my goal this year is to really connect more with you.
So, I love it when you send me messages, emails or in the contact form and you share your progress and even when you recommend topics. I get those occasionally, and I love getting those because I really want to hear what's important to you, and that's what happened for this topic, for this episode.
And today's topic was suggested by listener Jess. So Jess, thank you so much for your message and recommendation for an episode on gate or walking with a limp. This one's for you.
And you know, this was a very challenging topic because it's absolutely huge. And we could talk about it. We could talk about gate and walking and the limp for 10 hours and we still wouldn't get through everything.
So, the challenge of this episode was breaking it down into something helpful and meaningful to you. All right?
And I've actually had to break it up into a couple different episodes because when I was preparing for this topic, this is what happens when I prepare for a topic. If you don't know, if you've never put together anything like this, this is what happens.
I write down a bunch of notes. I think about the things that are relevant. I take a bunch of notes. I organize them into some relevant subtopics, and then I put them into some order that makes sense, something that I can follow along in my head as I'm talking with you.
And I did this for several hours for this episode. I had a lot of notes, and then I threw them all away because it was hard to make heads or tails and narrow it down because we can't talk about the limp or a gate directly without talking about a higher-level issue first. And this topic got really big.
And that higher-level issue that we need to talk about before we can talk about gate is this.
What did you go to the surgeon for in the first place? Why did you go?
And I think most of us went there because we had a defective joint.
Now, the defective joint is not the same as your limp. And fixing the joint is not the same thing as fixing the limp. They're two totally different things.
Just because you get the hip joint replaced and fixed does not mean that the limp goes away. Let me say that again. Just because you get the hip joint replaced and fixed does not mean the limp goes away.
You were probably limping for years, unless you've had an injury and then all of a sudden you needed a hip replacement. But if it has been a slowly progressing issue for you and you're anything like me, you were probably limping for years before the hip replacement surgery, and you're going to be limping for a long time after.
A long time is relative for a lot of different reasons.
But fixing the hip joint does not mean that all the pain is going to go away and stay away.
The pain from the joint itself, from the mechanical part of the joint itself, will go away after the surgery. But you may be experiencing pain and some discomfort for reasons other than the actual bone issue.
So there's a lot of things going on in the hip, and there's a lot of reasons for the hip pain, but a lot of times we think that the hip replacement surgery is going to get rid of the pain and the limp.
And after surgery, something may not feel right or you may be in pain. So what happens is you go back to the surgeon for an X-ray, which turned out to look perfect. This happened to me.
I was having pain in my thigh, on the side of my thigh, long years after the surgeries, and I went back, had the X-rays.
Your X-rays look perfect. The hip implants are perfect. It's not a skeletal issue. The surgeon did a great job. It was a muscular issue.
But if the X-rays look great, then why are you still in pain or discomfort? And why are you still limping?
Because many of us can limp for a long time after surgery, and we can't figure it out. We go to the surgeon. Surgeon says, “Nope, everything looks great. So why are you still limping?”
And are you ready for the answer? Some people may not like it, but here's the answer.
Because you relied on the surgeon to fix the entire problem when their role was just to fix one piece of the entire problem.
So before we can go deep into the limp issue, we need to understand a little bit more about the overall problem that we had or still have.
We have an overall problem that has many components.
It could include a joint issue, the skeleton, the muscles, maybe our weight, maybe our nutrition, our mental health, our mental state, our expectations for the surgery, for recovery, for the future, and maybe even our self-esteem. What we think we deserve out of a recovery.
We may not even realize all these things are present because they've been with us for so long, and they may be deep rooted in our mind and in our body and in our psyche. They're there somewhere.
So when we go to the surgeon, we hope or we expect to come out on the other side after surgery feeling much better. But the surgeon has nothing to do with many of these other issues.
And this is a very important topic that we're going to dedicate a separate episode specifically to these things.
But for now, we expect a hip replacement surgery to get rid of our pain and restore functionality of the hip. And we're mistaken in that desire or hope. We expect too much of a surgery.
A successful surgery will restore the function of the hip joint without doing any unnecessary damage to other systems in the body. That's it. It's going to restore the skeletal function of the hip joint. That's it.
And you need to understand that first before we can move on to the actual limp. Because if we're expecting the surgery to be this magic pill to take care of our back, to take care of our hip, our limp, the pain in our legs, I think we're misguided in what we're expecting.
So, you may be sitting there scratching your head or shaking your head and saying to yourself, “So, you mean I could still have a successful surgery and still have a limp?”
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Believe me, getting rid of my limp was a huge priority for me.
But I was fortunate enough to ask a lot of questions and to do some research and have a surgeon and physical therapist guide me and explain the purpose of the surgery and explain the purpose of the physical therapy and explain other things that I may have to deal with.
So the surgery wasn't a magic pill. It wasn't a solution to everything. It was a solution to one item, one issue of a big overall problem.
And yeah, getting rid of the limp was a huge priority for me after I woke up from surgery.
Of course, my first priority was just being able to walk, being able to move around, being able to be functional. But after that, I really wanted to get rid of my limp.
Years before my surgery, even years before my surgery, I was limping around, and it just got worse and worse and worse. And obviously, the farther I walked, the more I was limping.
And it really impacted my life for years before because I would change what I wanted to do. I would change where I was going. I would limit myself to where I could go, where I wanted to go, because I didn't want to walk that far. Because I didn't want to limp.
I didn't want to be out in a park or out golfing or out on vacation and not have somewhere to sit down other than the ground or not have things to hold on to.
And I didn't want to have to walk too far because I didn't want to make a scene. I was too embarrassed about it. It was a visible sign that I had a defect.
And even going around work in my office building, I did my best not to get up from my desk and walk around. And if I did, I tried to keep my walks short. I held on to things to kind of hide my limp.
I didn't want to be that person with a limb. Be that person with a defect. I didn't want to appear weak in my office job or just out in public.
When I went grocery shopping, I always wanted to hold the cart so that I could use the cart as like a walking aid.
And that was embarrassing to me because I was in my 30s when that was happening.
So it was a very difficult time for me as I was dealing with this limp because it was this outward sign that I had a problem, and I couldn't really hide from it totally.
So getting rid of the limp was a huge priority.
And when I was in my office job, I used to wear this lanyard. Okay. And it is a necklace, and at the end of the necklace or lanyard it had an ID badge, and we had to carry these around everywhere so that we could gain access to different rooms or different floors in the building or even access to the building.
Some people wore lanyards like I did. Some people wore them with a clip on their belt or around their waist, something clipped it to their waist.
All right. And the reason I chose to wear the lanyard rather than having it on my waist, even though that wasn't really the hip thing to do—people mostly wore them on their waist—was because it was a signal to me.
It told me if I was limping too bad.
Because what would happen when I was limping too bad, the lanyard would sway back and forth from left to right.
I would be so used to limping that I didn't know I was actually doing it. But the lanyard swaying back and forth across my chest would remind me that I was limping, and then I could proactively try to stop limping.
Maybe by grabbing some furniture, holding on to the wall, sitting down, taking a break, doing whatever excuse I could do at the time so that I could stop moving or get some help moving to reduce my limp.
Because as I'm walking down the hall, the last thing I wanted people to see was me coming up the hall swaying, wobbling back and forth from left to right. It made me feel less of a person.
So I used the lanyard as a signal to help me know when I was limping badly because I would be swaying side to side.
So we needed to understand the whole reason we went to the surgeon to begin with, to eliminate this big problem that we had.
But I think we're asking too much of the surgeon and of the surgery. The surgeons are generally excellent. They're very highly trained in a specific thing, and I'm very grateful for the surgeon that I had. He did excellent work.
But I'm also fortunate to get the help I needed to realize that there are bigger issues that I needed to address other than the skeleton part of the problem being replaced.
So I hope you realize that we can't just expect the surgery itself, which replaces the skeleton portion of the hip, of the body, to help us change everything.
That hip may work perfectly now or after surgery, and you could still have a severe limp, and that's going to take some time. That's going to take some effort to address.
And we're going to get into, in the next episode, the different things related to the limp itself. We're going to get into just talking about the lingering old limp.
Why are you still limping after so long?
The weak muscles you may have. Having a shorter stride or a step after the surgery. Unequal leg length and the impact that has on a limp. Your toes turning in or out.
And I've had this—I have this issue too.
The surgeon came into the hospital room a few hours after surgery and told me that the guidance system, the computer-guided system, failed. So, they had to go manually and eyeball it. So, my hip may not have been put back perfectly.
And at the time, I didn't know what that meant because I was still loopy because of the pain medication and just being out and just waking up.
But I found out later what that meant. That was that my second hip replacement, my toes are turned open because the hip was put back slightly open. Not severely, but open.
So, we'll talk about that.
And finally, we'll talk about poor balance after a hip replacement surgery and why that may be happening. The last thing we want is poor balance to cause us to have a fall or to cause us to wobble back and forth or to do things and take risks that we really don't want to be taking with a hip replacement surgery.
So, we'll talk about all those specific things in the next episode, but today I just wanted to get out there that we may be expecting too much from the surgeon and the surgery because their purpose is to address one small piece of an overall bigger issue.
So hopefully that point came across today, and we'll get into those other specifics in the next episode.
But thank you so much for tuning into The Hip Replacement Podcast. Until next time, I wish you the best recovery possible. Take care.
