Check out this story I wrote about 4 years ago about the hip surgeries I had to have.
See you on the Field
I was only fourteen years old and in the middle of baseball season when tragedy struck: I was feeling pain in my thigh that I had never felt before. It felt a lot like when you pull a groin muscle, but as soon as I did a few groin stretches the pain went away. Since the pain went away and I was a teenage boy, I didn’t bother telling my parents about it. However, it didn’t take long for my parents to find out something was wrong with me.
It was the fourth of July weekend in 2004 and my family and our neighbors were spending the weekend in Washington State at a lake cabin my family owned on Lake Merwin. Lake Merwin is a twelve-mile long reservoir about thirty-five miles north of Vancouver, Washington. On the Sunday before we left to go home my father wanted to take our neighbors to Mt. St. Helens, which was only a half hour drive from our cabin. When I turned down the chance to go on the hike, which I normally hiked every time I got the chance, my parents knew something had to be wrong. I finally told them about the pain I had been feeling before and how it had become worse.
My parents took me to the doctors that Tuesday to find out if the pain I was feeling was anything serious. The doctor took some x-rays of both my hips. After the x-rays were developed, he came back into the room to tell me and my parents what he found: that my right femur was slipping out of the hip joint very slowly. This condition is called Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis or SCFE for short. It occurs most commonly in boys between the age of eleven and sixteen years old. It was very important that I had surgery as soon as possible so it was scheduled for that very afternoon. If I had put off the surgery a couple more months it was possible that my femur could have come completely out of the joint. If that had happened, I would have needed complete hip replacement. It’s somewhat ironic that I was scheduled for this surgery because my parents were just talking that last weekend about how I was the only child in my family of four children to not have surgery or stitches and now I was going to have one.
My oldest sister and youngest brother both had their spleens removed shortly after birth. Both my younger brother and I were adopted so we were not born with the same problem as my sister and youngest brother. My younger brother when he was three fell and hit his forehead on a brick fireplace and had to have stitches.
I went back to my house because my surgery wasn’t scheduled until later that afternoon and it was only about ten in the morning when I left the doctor’s office. It seemed like time stood still as I sat around my house waiting until it was time to go to the hospital. My parents made calls to relatives and family friends to let everyone know what was happening.
When it was nearing my scheduled surgery time my parents and I drove to the hospital, checked in, and were assigned to a room for the night. We went to the room and I had to change into one of those hospital gowns. I really didn’t like the outfit because it was very cold and a little to revealing for my taste. I was scared for my surgery because I had never been in a hospital until this day. I had heard stories of people waking up during surgery or waking up afterwards and finding surgical tools still inside them. I would totally freak if any of those things happened to me.
When it was finally time for my surgery two nurses came to my room and pushed me in my bed down several halls and an elevator to the basement. It was even colder than it was in my room, and as they wheeled me into the surgery room, I began to shiver from the cold. In the surgery room, the walls were painted white and had stainless steel paneling halfway up the wall from the ground. The surgery table was also stainless steel and in the middle of the room. Several stainless steel cabinets on wheels about seven feet tall were lined up on the far wall filled with heated towels and blankets. I was young enough to be able to be put to sleep with anesthesia because I hate getting shots and didn’t want to be awake when they placed the IV. I was completely wiped out within seconds of starting the gas.
I woke up in what seemed like minutes later and I was in the recovery room. The room had five or six hospital beds all were empty except for mine. Each bed had curtains that could be pulled around them, but they were all open even mine. There was a nurse sitting behind a desk working diligently on the computer. There was a lot of pain in my hip from the surgery, so the nurse sitting next to me gave me some pain medication through my IV. I had to wait in the recovery room for at least an hour to make sure that everything went well, then I was able to go back to my room. Throughout the night nurses came in to check on me, always waking me up, so I didn’t get any sleep that night.
The next day as I was waiting for my surgeon to tell me about the surgery and give me the ok to leave, a nurse came in and showed me how to use crutches. I had to learn to walk on level surface, and since I lived in a two story house I had to learn how to walk safely up and down stairs. It wasn’t long after I had finished learning how to use crutches, when my surgeon came to my room and said that the surgery went great and I was free to go home and rest.
The recovery time was long and tedious; day after day I laid on my couch or in my bed because I wasn’t able to move a lot. For four weeks I had to use crutches whenever I had to move from place to place. After the first four weeks I was allowed to walk without crutches, but could not continue sports until I went through physical therapy which was an additional six grueling weeks.
This occurred only a couple years ago, and thanks to medical science and my parents I was able to continue playing baseball. Unfortunately the same thing happened a year later while playing baseball but to the left hip. It wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the doctor. If it was to happen to my left hip it should have done so in the first six to eight months this was a whole year later. But once again I had to go through all of those things I did the first time. Now I will be able to play sports without having to worry about my femurs slipping out of the joints. See you on the field.
