Hips don't lie

This post is brought to you by the letter "P"...as in Percocet. My apologies if something doesn't make sense, but enough of you have been requesting the story, so here it is...drug-induced and all!

First of all, between my back and hip pain for the last 8-10 years, I always kinda thought that everyone had some kind of annoying physical malady. However, this I came to realize this was not the case after talking to a few friends and coworkers.

My hip pain had eventually reached the point that walking and biking were becoming too painful to do. Really?! Too painful to WALK?! Best way I can describe it is having a flathead screwdriver inserted into your hip socket and popping the cartilage back and forth...yeah, no bueno. Thankfully for me, my cousin married an awesome guy who decided to become an orthopedic surgeon specializing in, among other things, hips. I met with him and was diagnosed with a CAM Impingement, or Femoral acetabular impingement. Basically the extra bone towards the head of my femur was scraping away the cartilage in my hip socket...

 creating pain and 8-10 "loose bodies" (the white packing peanut looking object in the middle). They weren't much bigger than a pea.

Only way to fix it...surgery. An MRI was conducted to assess the extent of the cartilage and 3 LONG weeks later, I was under the knife.

It almost didn't happen. Apparently the evaluating doc with our insurance company thought that other steps short of surgery (i.e. stretching, etc) could have been taken to fix this, but we didn't find that out until day of the surgery. Tuesday morning/afternoon I ended up waiting for over 3 hours in my hospital gown and hairnet til my doctor could get the on-call insurance doc on the phone to discuss it and get approval. This doctor immediately saw the need and apologized profusely. We were back on board!

The anesthesiologist gave me the orientation, then took me into the operating room. With the help of the nurses they got me hooked up to anesthetic and I was off to happy land.

2 hours later...

 Close up shots of the area that has been shaved away

I eventually fully awoke in recovery...like an hour after surgery was done. What a blissful time that was; floating in and out of consciousness. Totally surreal feeling that I wouldn't mind having again. I was, however, worried that I was going to be late getting out of there, thus making my mom (who was going to be picking me up) late...funny the things you worry about.

Ever since arriving home on Tuesday evening I have been enjoying a steady stream of pain meds, ice pack therapy, compression hosiery for the next two weeks, crutches for the next month (modeled by the lovely Laura),

and food and desserts. I've been so humbled with the outpouring of love and support and am reminded, in a BIG way, of just how awesome Laura is. With me not assuming my regular duties, she has taken over everything...she even killed a huge spider; no small feat for this woman! Laura has lovingly supported and assisted her invalid husband with menial (though challenging to me) tasks, even if I could have "technically" done them myself. Truly an inspiration to me of Christ-like service.

I am also grateful to work for a company who has been so flexible, understanding and who have allowed me to do so much of my job from home. It's nice knowing that everything is being taken care of for me back at the office. I'll probably still try to go in a few days next week in order to gear up for our Chalk Art Festival.

Here goes nothing!