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Five Post Surgery Distractions
If you’re like me, all you want after surgery is distraction. It’s easy to wallow in the pain and get lost in napping. Although I appreciate letting my body rest, it’s helpful to have distractions when I’m all rested. So here are some ways that I like to distract myself post surgery! Writing I really enjoy writing. Whether it be journalling, writing blog articles, or working on a project, writing is a good outlet. It can be difficult to get started, especially if the pain is intense. Once I find my rhythm though it’s easy to get into a flow state of mind. Not only is that helpful to alleviate…
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I Had My Second Hip Surgery
I finally did it. I went through my seventh and hopefully, my final surgery. It was worse than I anticipated. I beat my own record of the worst labral tear my surgeon had ever seen. They had to put so much fluid into my hip it was equivalent to that of a hip replacement. I woke up in intense and severe pain. It wasn’t at all what I anticipated or hoped for. Luckily, it’s day two and things are already improving. Once that fluid is absorbed by the body, the pain starts going down. Although I’m still swollen throughout my entire leg, it’s nowhere near as bad as yesterday. I’m…
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Preparing for More Surgery
Here we go again. I’m preparing for another surgery. I’m excited at the prospect of getting this done and over with. I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to receive great medical care. This surgery is going to be more complicated to prep for though. I need to have my left hip fixed. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that almost a year ago I had a labral repair on my right hip. Along with sewing my labrum back together, they pulled apart my tendon and shaved down my bone. I’m waiting to find out the extent of the surgery I need on the right…
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Dealing With Bad News
My medical life has been relatively stable lately. It’s been an incredible change that I’m very grateful for. That being said, I have suffered a setback. Several weeks ago, I started having pretty intense shin pain. It would come and go varying on activity level. It masked itself as knee pain or other various complications of weak hips. Now, the pain has become daily. I brought it up to my surgeon, per the advice of my physical therapist and they’ve told me that I need to rest. That may seem like an easy answer to most people. If you’ve followed my journey for a while, you know that exercise is…
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How To Prepare For a Hip Arthroscopy
I was nervous going into my hip surgery. I had never had orthopedic surgery. The only comfort I felt was that it couldn’t be worse than the feeling of my labrum tearing. I didn’t know where to begin when preparing for this surgery. After searching the internet, I found a few ways to prepare. I put them all together creating a plan for after I got home from the hospital. So here is a compiled list of how to prepare for your hip arthroscopy. Strengthen Your Arms I thought of this on my own ahead of time. I stopped working out due to my hip and suddenly I realized I’d…
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A Setback
About two weeks ago, I wrote about the progress I was making with my hip. I was thrilled at the prospect of biking thirty minutes each day. I could take long walks without pain or issue. I was elated. Now, I’ve had a setback. It’s not major but any setback can feel like a blow, not only in my progress but to my confidence. I want to trust my hip and allow it to succeed but the more I worked, the more pain came along with it. I discussed this with my physical therapist and even my surgeon. A setback is to be expected here and there but I wasn’t…
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Exercises for After a Hip Arthroscopy
Finding exercises that don’t include your hip feels impossible. At least in my experience. All abdominal exercises and even some arm exercises include the hip. Now I’m not a personal trainer or a physical therapist. I have absolutely no qualifications to tell you how you should or shouldn’t exercise. I’m simply putting this out there because it took around ten hours of google and youtube searching to find exercises. I wanted to recondition my body without involving my hip. Crunches Crunches are a great exercise when you want to work on your abs. It’s the only exercise that I’ve found to be applicable to my situation. I tried a sit…
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Making Progress With My Hip
After my hip surgery, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. For the most part, everyone is excited to see the progress I’ve made. I’m ahead of schedule and my hip is recovering nicely. I was ecstatic to get off crutches but it came with a price. I started to have extra pain in my hip when walking, something I didn’t experience with crutches. This brought me to a difficult fork in the road. Suddenly, I had to scale back what I was doing to accommodate this new change. Even with that set back, I’ve started physical therapy and we can see new results everyday. Choosing to get this…
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What I Learned From Hip Surgery
We all know that surgery, in one form or another, is not always an enjoyable experience. It’s not the worst by any means (at least mine haven’t been) but if given the choice, most of us would opt out. Orthopedic surgery is a whole new experience for me. It’s the first opportunity I have to jeopardize my health by trying to recover too quickly. It doesn’t matter if I want to walk, if I want to push through pain, or if I want to test the limits of what my new hip can do. I can cause damage. That scares me. Everyone who is close to me is aware of…
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Preparing For Surgery
I have a surgery date for my hip arthroscopy! This is exciting to me because I’m ready to start recovery. My surgery will take place the second week of February. Apparently, I like to recover during holidays because it’s the day before Valentine’s day. Getting to this point was a long journey and now it’s time to prepare. This means that I need to train Crush to work with crutches. This is new to both of us. I need to strengthen my body, specifically my abdominal muscles and my arms. Finally, I need to prepare for being somewhat immoblie. This means moving into a different room closer to surgery.The appointment…
