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Hello Everyone, I am now 5 months post op (posterior THR), and have gotten a good bit of my normal life back. I can sit “crisscross applesauce,” sit o
[See the full post at: 5 Months Post Op]Hoppie – sorry for your frustrations with movement restrictions… I’ve been told I’ll be slightly delayed with mine though I’m just 3 months post op now. I had posterior approach and have still a decent degree of movement restrictions via pain near my incision; muscular related. I posed your same question to the group about six weeks ago; how do you know if you are doing damage to the “hardware”? I didn’t really get an answer… Other than to carefully monitor pain, strain, and soreness in the hip area. I resumed fairly easy jogging 7 weeks post-op and have run 2 5-K “races” in the last 3 weeks… that’s probably sounds reckless to some but I am really just listening to my body. If I am not having pain and upon x-ray and check in with my orthopedic and PT am not causing problems, I will continue!
Interesting. I thought you had the anterior approach because you’re so far ahead of where I was. It took me almost 3 months to be able to walk 5K.
Towards the end of my 3 months, when I started pushing the envelope a little, I felt tightness when I was trying to move further because of the scar tissue, and because I hadn’t moved in those ways in 3 months!
What I was told by my PT is that the goal was to get the soft tissues to “scar in” as tightly to the prothesis as possible; therefore I wasn’t supposed to do anything to stretch them. If they scarred in tight, they’d help hold the prothesis in and prevent dislocation. The risk of dislocation is highest in the first few months, but it never entirely disappears.
I would agree–it it hurts, don’t do it.
Cheers!
Hi Hoppie,
I had to look up the details of the dual mobility prosthetic to see the bearing surfaces and found a paper on the Stryker version examining devices that had been removed during revision ops. Most of the wear seems to be in the small bearing where most of the motion takes place. Stryker seem to think their crosslinked polyethylene wears very well. I know the French are keen on dual-mobility for skiers and climbers and I correspond occasionally with someone who has them bilateral and still works as a mountain guide. Not a runner, though.
My ceramic/ceramic THR was placed by a lateral incision, a long one like yours, and my surgeon specifically said I could carry on doing all the things I do, running, biking, climbing etc and I would not be able to break it. Pretty reassuring! I was jogging at 6 weeks, racing 5k every Saturday after a couple of months and at nearly 4 years am doing better than ever in age-graded terms having just turned 70. My other hip is metal on metal resurfacing, this will wear but blood tests can detect the metal ions to give some warning.
Not sure how to advise you to proceed other than to ‘listen to your body’ like all of us will say. Try jogging, see how it goes, be happy with strenuous hiking if it does not suit you. Dislocation is pretty rare nowadays even without the dual bearing.Good luck!
Thanks, Pete! It’s interesting that you found a paper on dual mobility implants which had been removed; I didn’t find anything like that when I was doing my pre-op research. If you still have that link handy, I’d love to read it.
I’m doing lots of walking now, about an hour a day. Power walking is up next; I hope that the swelling around the incision has gone down enough to tolerate the addition stress of the power walking.
Cheers,
Hoppiehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6345163/
Hi Hoppie – link to the research I mentioned, I struggled to find it again by searching, had to look in history so I am not surprised you didn’t discover it for yourself!
Cheers, Pete
Hi Hoppie,
I don’t worry much about a revision. My quality of life is very important to me, and running is a key contributor to my quality of life. It’s been 9 years since I got my hip replacement and I am still going strong. We are all a big experiment. I hope you find solace and support from us. Don’t ignore the doc, but be sure to question the recommendations and see if there is some wiggle room for you to test the hip by running a little.
Thanks, Tom. I am encouraged by the success of folks here to try a little running. Not yet– I’ll wait until the swelling has completely gone down because I think running would aggravate it. But you are so right about quality of life. I don’t like the idea of having running taken away from me if in fact it would be OK for me to do it. So I’ll give it a try when the time is right.
-Hoppie
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