Tuesday evening, after a busy day of housework, laundry and such, I bent down to pick up some magazines in my bedroom that were on the floor. I never made it to them. I felt my hip sort of collapse and then was in the worst pain I think I've ever experienced. Worse than childbirth. Worse than herniating a disc...I couldn't move my leg or really anything at all. I made it to a chair with my daughter's help (and much swearing) and we called 911.
The transfers from the chair to the "step chair" -(which is a canvas chair on wheels which they used to get me out of the tight corners of my small room and down my deck stairs) and then the change from the step chair to the gurney were excruciating beyond the power of words to describe. I was so grateful for the obvious physical strength of the paramedics who were able to lift my 160 pounds with seeming ease and were able to support the chair on the steps with a minimum of jouncing. The ambulance ride, with the bumpy roads and turns, were also not fun (to use a ridiculous understatement), but eventually we got to the local hospital.
The doctors there were able, with a lot of difficulty, to get my hip back into the socket...after about 3 hours of preliminary waiting and struggling to get an IV into my pathetic veins (only 5 tries tonight!). I've never, ever been so glad to see a drug being injected into my IV line as I was tonight! I was terrified that I would be conscious and aware during the procedure, but thank God, and thank Dr. Hamud, I was not. The hip kept popping back out as they attempted to get it to stay in...and finally (for now) it did. The doctor and the nurses kept reiterating that it will most likely not stay put, however. The doctor told my husband if it dislocates three times, they will have to do a revision surgery. :(
I am terrified now of the recurrence of that pain. You can bet that I will be treating my new joint a lot more carefully as it heals, than I did the first time around! I did not fully appreciate the danger or the incredible pain and probably pushed myself too hard, too fast. I just hope that my new efforts at caution will be sufficient to keep this one in place.
Everyone I encountered tonight; from the paramedics to the nurses to the Xray tech to the unit clerk; were all wonderful and blessings from God. I think it even turned out to be a blessing that I did not have my way and get transferred from that hospital to the one where I had my surgery. (However, they would have had to do that, had not the doctor here been successful at getting it back together). This way there was much less of a wait time until I got those sweet drugs to knock me out, than there would have been had I gone back to NY.
So now, I'm back to intensely missing my laptop...and being, once again very limited in the time I can spend at the PC due to pain. Please keep us all in prayer: my whole family. Each family member has some health struggles of their own now...so we are a mess.
There's no "deeper meaning" to this blog...except perhaps to say that I'm so grateful that people were praying for me tonight. Before the paramedics took me to the ambulance, I had time to call my Pastor and get myself put on the prayer chain. Within minutes my entire church was praying for me...and I knew, as I lay biting my lips in pain in the ER, that those prayers were being offered. I was able to stay calm and, over all, the whole experience was as good as it could have been under those circumstances. God even was working as He disregarded my prayer to make it to the NY hospital...because He knew that this option was the kinder one.
If you are a person given to prayer; please keep me in your discussions with God when you happen to think of me in the next week or so....I can use all the prayer you can "spare."
Blessings!
Cynthia
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