Surgery and Date

Dr. Buly called yesterday with the results and said that the femur, which appeared to be retroverted 2 degrees on the X ray, is actually at 10 degrees. So he recommended a femoral osteotomy, the shorter surgery where the femur is cut and rotated to get better coverage and then held in place with a metal plate (like staking a plant as my stepmom so accurately put it!).

The cartilage overall is a 1 (hooray!) but there is a small spot where it is worn down to the bone (ow!) so he's also going to drill into the bone to try and stimulate the cartilage growth. Also the labrum is torn so he's going to do some arthroscopy as well to clean it up a bit. It's all kinds of messed up in there, basically. He said there's a 1% risk of infection, but that doing this surgery may mean I don't need hip replacement down the line. Dr. Helfet at HSS who does osteotomies and Dr. Kelly who does arthroscopes will be shown the scans to confirm his diagnosis. He also gave me the name of a patient who has had this surgery who has been willing to talk to pre-ops like me.

6 weeks 20% weight bearing on crutches is still his prediction. Maybe it's a shorter time than some others I've read about because I'm so buff ;-)

Also my rotation in the joint will still allow good range of motion, which was a big concern for me, but it will be different - right now I have very little internal rotation and way too much external rotation (which means I can do a lot of crazy yoga poses but only on one side).

I was reeling a little from that when his nurse called back to schedule the surgery for Tuesday April 24th. Which made me reel even more.

Then I posted to the hipwomen group on yahoo about it and have gotten some replies that are making me a little concerned. The general tone is that nowadays PAO is the standard surgery and that FO is a little old school and only used when the Dr in question doesn't know how to do a PAO. Which is not the case with Dr. Buly, but I'm also being told that recovery is a lot more painful because the femur is a denser bone than the pelvis, and that the hardware removal is more complicated and will require another month on crutches when that happens.

So I'm going to try and go up to Boston to see Dr. Millis at Children's Hospital. He's the big deal man on the East Coast. Part of me is so ready to go ahead and do the surgery now that I have a date that I have to keep reminding myself to slow down and get all the opinions, weigh all the advice... patience is not my strongest suit...