OK, guys, I’m back. The gluteus minimus tendon, (mine was torn on the left side) is a major tendon that holds the hip girdle together and allows you to stand and walk easily.
Did you get a cortisone inject. and/or go for the surg. repair?
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!! Don’t let them inject cortisone!!! Yes, they tried that first when they all refused to acknowledge that I could have torn the tendon and insisted I had bursitis. Mine may have been, or started with, a horse injury, but I have an underlying autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. That leaves you with a great deficit of thyroid hormone (even though the thyroid lab tests look normal - another battle that I won’t go into further here) that possibly/probably weakened the tendon by causing it to thin and stretch and also destroying the collagen and making the whole connection brittle. I think it was when they added the cortisone that it finally, completely tore. Who really knows.
Cortisone weakens the connective tissue and turns the tendon mushy. The surgeon was furious when he heard they had given me cortisone shots. He thought he might not have any good tissue to work with.
Anyway. It was a nightmare to get it diagnosed and while they were futzing around with trying to figure out what was wrong with me they said, “Oh well, even if it is torn, it can’t be repaired anyway”. Well, the doc that finally finally diagnosed it - by another MRI - said they had a new joint replacement specialist there that he wanted to talk to about it. He called me in for a review and exam and said he could repair it. He’d only done about 10 before, but his mentors in New York City do 1500 - 1800 a year, most of them referred in.
Well, once this tendon is torn off the hip, you lose one body side’s support. I walked with a pretty good limp for a long time - EVEN with a cane suppporting me. I was slouched over and blamed that on being tall when I was a kid.
Once the surgery was done to reattach the tendon, surprise, surprise, even standing with a walker I could stand up straight for the first time in years. I can walk without a limp now with crutches or a cane. I still have a limp without, but it’s not completely healed inside now. That limp is going to go away.
What he did was to drill 4 holes in the trochanter, suture the living daylights out of the tendon, pass the sutures through the holes and fasten it down. He also put a zenigraft on the tendon to help thicken it and prevent adhesions. He scraped the surface of the trochanter to rough it up and make it bleed and pressed the end of the tendon down into the grooves to make it adhere.
I have to be very careful for at least 6 months - re-attaching tendon to bone is very difficult - and all my PT is absolutely without resistance of any kind. No weights, no stretchy bands.
I did years of PT. It was worthless with the tendon ripped off. I was called a malingerer and/or told I wasn’t working hard enough because there was absolutely no progress. Well, you can’t build up strength in something that is not attached. I had also torn the gluteus medius muscle that the tendon is attached to.
Since the surgery, even with relatively mild exercises in PT, I can feel my strength growing every day. Each day in PT is progress now, where I never had progress before.
Cortisone and PT are NOT the answer. The big problem is finding someone who can make a proper diagnosis and then finding someone who can do the repair. It seems that a hip replacement specialist is the best bet. They are most familiar with the structures in the hip, and it turns out that some of the repairs my doc had made - and probably other hip replacement specialists too - were found serendipitously when they went in to replace a hip and found the tendon torn off. They just replaced it and probably never wrote it up or anything because they may have just assumed it was part of the general hip problem.
