Loosened hip, torn tendon, now a broken leg

Neil thought everyone may like to have an update on how I am going lately.

After progressing well with physio and hydrotherapy, I was starting to get around fairly easy with crutches, but still with a bit of pain. I had a follow-up appointment with the hospital who did some more x-rays.These showed that my hip socket had loosened a bit more, so some shift between when I was first diagnosed with the loosened prosthesis. My knee x-rays showed that they were still in decent condition, so not to worry about them for a while yet. I was told to wait as long as I can to get the hip redone.

So things were going along ok, and I must have overdone a physio session when the thigh muscle in my right leg became extremely sore, to the point where it was very hard to put weight through my leg. In having this, I was now putting weight through my left leg. This continued for about 5 days. The thigh muscle seemed to improve, but now my left knee was extremely painful and swollen.

I had to take the rest of the week off work, and the pain in the knee which I thought would improve did not, so off to the specialist I went today. I have a lovely Rheumatologist, Dr Stephen Hall. He is very efficient and is a professor in his field and very highly regarded. He told me that he suspects I have a small insufficiency fracture of the medial tibial plateau – in other words a fractured bone or broken leg (which I think sounds a bit extreme). Anyway, he suggested I have a bone scan to confirm this as a normal x-ray would not show it up. I have had a couple of bone scans before. The bit I don’t like about them is they have to inject a radioactive liquid into my veins. But because I have crap veins and they can’t use my port-a-cath implant, it is usually very painful, so not a procedure I care to indulge in if I can help it. So I am going to wait a week, take more pain medication and see where I am at then. If it is still bad, then I will have the scan done.

If the scan shows up that there is a fracture, there is not a lot I can do about it. He said it can take up to 8 weeks to heal, but I could have some sort of injection into the area to help it heal faster, so may look at that. The good news is that I am allowed to still walk around on crutches, as much as I can tolerate the pain, so I am not stuck in getting around the house. Until the pain subsides a lot, I will not be going back to work yet.

So that’s where I am at, not a great deal better than last time I wrote, but at least my hips are not giving me much pain at the moment and my right knee is fairly good too.

Naomi out :)