Joining the hip pain club

[QUOTE=Classicgal;8416526]
It’s interesting to hear people who say they are not as crooked after hip surgery. I always had trouble being slightly crooked even when young. I found out I had a little scoliosis and compensated altho no instructor ever believed me when I said I had to be straight in Either my hips or shoulders, not both. My heart horse and I did well but I did have trouble with the canters to the left. And when I rode other highly schooled horses I would inadvertently make them doing lead changes until I sorted it out.[/QUOTE]

How did you sort it out? I know my left leg does not have the same range of motion as my right. I think in trying to cue for the right lead, I inadvertently lighten my seat on the left. The right lead is my Achilles Heel.

Greetings from Colorado, all!

My move resulted in a bit of COTH absenteeism recently.

First and foremost, Simkie, what in the name of all that is holy did you do to piss off the universe and end up with labral tears/issues in both hips and a bone chip in one?! That is terrible news! I hope your pain specialist is able to get you some relief while you wait to see a surgeon about the more general plan. I’ve got my fingers crossed that if you do surgery again (ugh!) you’ll have better results.

I’m catching up on the thread during little breaks at work – still don’t have internet at home, thanks to ISP shenanigans. Still struggling to manage my own pain. Driving >2000 miles and then moving all of my worldly belongings (including some heavy furniture) into a 3rd floor walk-up apartment was absolutely not what the doctor ordered. Quite the opposite, in fact! It’s a good thing my horse is still back east with my trainer while I recover from the move – the thought of swinging my leg over to mount makes me sick at the moment!

Wishing you all a less painful new year!

Welcome to Colorado. Good luck with everything!

Be kind to yourself, x-halt! Moving is hard work. I hope you’re getting settled :slight_smile: Say hello to the mountains for me!

I don’t know who/what I got on the wrong side of, but I’ve continued the trend with the pain people and the surgeon. Surgeon says there’s nothing he can do for me. Disagrees with the radiologist and, oh, everyone else who who has looked at the MRI of the left and thinks it is normal. Says the tear on the right is “not unusual.” Pretty much told me to GTFO of his office. Like many orthopedic surgeons, he just has AWESOME social skills (do you see my sarcasm font?)

The pain people pretty much just upped my gabapentin. (And told me to GTFO of their office.)

I did find an awesome sports med guy in the cities who is brilliant and listens and actually seems to see me as a human being instead of an item on an assembly line. He injected both hips with triamcinolone and blocked them both to do that and ah…sweet relief. At least until the block wore off :lol: I’m scheduled with him in early Feb for PRP on both sides. I asked about IRAP, but I guess that’s not used in people medicine. Bummer. He also has some ideas about alternate surgeons to see if we need to go that route, but maybe the injections will take care of it. I am not real keen to go back to surgery, so we’ll roll with it.

More gabapentin made me sooooooper loopy, so I backed off again and have actually come off of it entirely. I do think the steroid is working a little, but I also started this goofy supplement: Zyflamed Whole Body which–rather SHOCKINGLY–seems to be helping at least as much as the gabapentin was. So if anyone else is in pain and desperate to the point of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, try a bottle of that. It’s two gel caps a day (I take them in the morning.)

man Simike…you are in doctor h*ll!!! are you near enough to a big city to find more options?

x-halt…moving is totally awful…I was crippled post move. hint - teach the pony to be OK w/ mounting from both sides. altho if yours is tall enough to have to have a foot in the stirrup to swing up, that might not work.

well crap…just went to buy the zyflamend and found it has tumeric…which my stomach objects to.

a couple other supplements that are supposed to be helpful in general are ASU (as in Cosequin ASU for horses), and denatured collagen. the sports med guy who did my original surgery also recommended a couple grams of fish oil a day.

my current guy recommends at least trying msm, chondroitin, and glucosamine, too.

Bummer on the tumeric, toller. I went looking specifically for tumeric…have tried it without success in the past, but people sure do say glowing things about it. Found this stuff on Amazon with good reviews, so figured why not. I did a trial of joint supplement stuff without finding it to help, and do take my omega 3 fish oil stuff every day.

I’m about 90 mins from MSP, so have options up there. But this isn’t a “small hospital” issue. I’m being seen at one of the largest, most highly respected hospitals in the country. Unfortunately, it’s still tough to find doctors who think you’re a person, even here. (Frankly, more so here.) Maybe if I were a sheikh or a head of state things would be different.

[QUOTE=Simkie;8482941]
I’m being seen at one of the largest, most highly respected hospitals in the country. Unfortunately, it’s still tough to find doctors who think you’re a person, even here. [/QUOTE]

total bummer…

if necessary i’m going back to the guy who did my first hip to get a referral for THR…(I know that isn’t what you are looking at…).

What is a labrum tear: hope I do not have it. A quick scan of all this did not
give much help…

A cartilage tear in the hip, foxtrot. Google will likely answer your basic questions…

So wanted to throw this out there: I had a bad fall (not riding, skiing) that resulted in a ton of muscle and ligament damage all the way from my back to my SI joint. I couldn’t control my torso at all for a couple months. It was pretty epic. Anyway, it settled into my hip and I had pretty intractable hip pain for a long time. I have a history of bursitis and IT band issues in that leg. I developed severe anterior pelvic tilt which I never had before and started wrecking the front of my hip.

Finally my PT, who is magic, said she wanted to treat it as if it’s messed up muscle patterns/ referred pain from my lumbar spine which was already kinda fubar but had been so for a long time and didn’t really hurt so we hadn’t been considering the “new” pain as particularly related. Hips look good on xray but I definitely had impingement. You could see it and feel it. I couldn’t fold my knee up to my chest, whereas formerly I could easily touch my nose to my knee while standing.

So she has me doing MacKenzie exercises and damn if it isn’t working. I can walk with a normal gait for long periods again at least half the time and sleep on my side. They are very simple and you can buy a book or youtube them to try it out. The theory behind them is vague to say the least but they seem to re-set the hip/ spine/ pelvis alignment by tricking your lower back and pelvis muscles into relaxing. I can feel it go ploop into place. You still need to build strength after but it was shockingly effective for me to fix my posture and the anterior pelvic tilt which we hadn’t been able to correct before. If it works you’ll know. Never in a million years did I think this would work.

One modification I have to make is to do something to relax my low back muscles first if they are in a particularly bad spasm. PT can poke at it or I can lay on an acupressure mat for a few minutes or take some advil. 100% worth a try. I do them 8 times a day :slight_smile:

That combined with yoga focused on my hips has helped a ton. We choose yoga because I used to do it a lot and I can be trusted to do the poses correctly (don’t hyper extend your knees!!! a lot of people with weak hips do and it’s the worst thing ever for your hips and back). And I am riding dressage in a GP dressage saddle which helps because I can ride shorter. I already disliked saddles that forced you to hyper extend your leg and now I really hate them. I’m also a big proponent of riding with a properly aligned spine and bent hip for shock absorption.

I’m currently riding after what ended up being diagnosed as a near-totally degenerated disc in my lumbar spine which is also herniated (different incident), a badly torn rotator cuff, two ribs with facet joint damage that used to visibly move around until PT fixed them and hurt so bad it made me angry, “severe” multifidous tear (it’s a muscle that holds your spine together- don’t tear it!), a torn SI ligament, torn lumbar something-ligament (attaches your pelvis to your back) and something-something hip/IT band/bursitis/impingement. No surgery (yet)! I did give up running but maybe someday… I have had bone spurs in my back since my 20s, have had a half dozen knee surgeries from a car wreck 20 years ago and have nerve damage in my leg from a bad cut on my upper thigh 10 years ago plus numerous other healed-ish injuries, mostly stupid in nature. Riding horses is the safest thing I do.

This hip pain was getting me down. It’s miserable. Good luck to you all and don’t be afraid to try different treatments. If it doesn’t work, move on. A coworker had TKR and is back Latin dancing after years of hobbling around. A good friend of mine had three labrum surgeries at Steadman and finally her PT just said she needed to push through the pain and get really, really strong to prevent re-tearing it. She was skeptical, she was royally pissed off actually and came over and cried at my kitchen table, but she did it and is back to winning in her sport in her 40s. Not competing, winning. And smashing records. So hang in there.

Sounds familiar! Sorry to hear that you’ve also landed in the office of one of these scalpel jockeys who seem disinterested in long-term patient outcomes.

I tried to say hello to the mountains for you this weekend – hiked out a couple of miles but was limping by the time I got past a couple of hogbacks and had to turn back. Not exactly the glorious front range homecoming I had envisioned a few months back!

I’m going to give that Zyflamed stuff a try, I think. I’m certainly reaching that stage of desperation. I started looking into health insurance plans here, and it looks like everything my employer makes available has huge deductables and steep coinsurance, so I’m starting to doubt whether it’s worth seeking further medical advice until I am able to somehow squirrel away a fair bit of money in a healthcare spending account. I have nothing but ill will toward whoever made these high-deductible, low-premium, coinsurance-based plans the new standard. I am realistically thinking I need to start saving now so I can afford a new hip whenever that ends up becoming necessary. Not exactly the sort of financial planning I thought I’d be doing in my early 30s!

[QUOTE=tollertwins;8481461]
x-halt…moving is totally awful…I was crippled post move. hint - teach the pony to be OK w/ mounting from both sides. altho if yours is tall enough to have to have a foot in the stirrup to swing up, that might not work.

my current guy recommends at least trying msm, chondroitin, and glucosamine, too.[/QUOTE]

It’s been a rough move, to say the least. But I think I’m finally past the worst of the physical and logistical stresses. Even with my incredibly strong sister and brother in law helping carry stuff up the stairs, my hip was pretty crippled for a couple of weeks.

Luckily my horse is not only tiny, she’s also a former therapy horse who’s also put in enough trail miles with me to have plenty of experience with mounting from whatever side works best in the moment! If I continue to wreck myself with moderate hikes before she comes out, we’ll still be able to tough out some sort of riding.

I’ve started taking a glucosamine/chondroitin supplement, for whatever its worth. I’ll put MSM on the list of ideas for semi-systematic personal experimentation as well.

It is easy to make it yourself. Many of the commercial preparations actually have too much curcumin in it. Make the paste and freeze it in little blobs so you can take it as a pill if you don’t like the taste.
http://www.turmericlife.com.au/turmeric-recipes-golden-paste/

Oh, x-halt :frowning: I’m so sorry the insurance situation looks grim. Do try the zyflamend…I continue to be impressed with it, and definitely notice a HUGE difference when I forget to take it. I’ve tried other turmeric things in the past, without much success, but this one seems to be different. I also do the nighttime one–which has limited waking up in pain in the morning.

If you can swing it, maybe a game ready or other ice machine would help? I scored one off craigslist and can’t WAIT for it to arrive. There are a few of them out there.

I went thru the same thing and have had 23 different hip surgeries, 3 of which were PAO’s. Have been fairly ok for the last few years, but I can feel things are going back to being in bad shape. I can say I literally feel your pain.

Joining the club.

I had surgery yesterday for a labral tear and the worst part is being dependent on other people.

Hope you have a swift recovery Gucci.

[QUOTE=GucciJumper;8514793]
Joining the club.

I had surgery yesterday for a labral tear and the worst part is being dependent on other people.[/QUOTE]

Isn’t it! Good luck recovering!

[QUOTE=GucciJumper;8514793]
Joining the club.

I had surgery yesterday for a labral tear and the worst part is being dependent on other people.[/QUOTE]

Oh boy is it ever. I think even worse for us, horse people are notoriously independent I think.

Good luck in the recovery. I’m now 18 weeks post surgery and pretty much back to normal minus the blood clot complication. Still no riding but that’s more because of the blood thinners than anything. I’m back to running, and pain free in the hip now, though the scar tissue gets tight and painful at times. For me, it was more than worth it considering I have a friend that never had the surgery and is in pain everyday from the tear, but I also know not everyone with the repair surgery has the same good outcome.

You know you’ve been dealing with too many lame horses when you wake up and think ‘Oh no! I’m trailing my RH again!’.

Sigh…