Around the age of 16, I discovered I could dunk a basketball, and the game of basketball suddenly became a bit more fun. When it comes to dunking, most people jump off both feet, leaping towards the hoop via an elegant synchronicity of upper and lower musculature. Sadly, I never had that strong a frame -- my standard joke has always been that I have the body of a 13-year-old African girl, and in my teen years, that wasn't far off -- so I dunked off one foot, pushing off with my left leg. At my jumping peak, I had around a 34" vertical leap, and dunking was relatively easy for a while. Just under twenty years, to be exact.
But when you dunk off one leg, that leg will twist in the socket like a mortar and pestle, with each twist grinding a bit of cartilage into nothing. And when you combine thousands of those twists over years of basketball with the odd now-and-again acute trauma -- such as the occasional undercut causing me to crash to the ground -- you end up with bone-on-bone severe degenerative osteoarthritis by your mid-thirties. This means that it's hard to walk, or sit, or drive, or sleep without some form of pain. Sometimes, the pain localizes around the knee, while other times it undulates like a lava lamp from the hip to the ankle. It's unpredictable, it's unrelenting, it doesn't respond well to medication, and it pisses me off to no end.
So on August 13th, after hemming and hawing for a couple of years, I'm planning to go under the knife downstate for an anterior left hip replacement. I'm anxious and nervous about that kind of surgery at my age, but when life starts to be negatively impacted on almost every level, it's time to take a drastic step. While it's morbid to say that I don't know how much longer I have to live, when the issue of quality of life is raised, it's a major consideration that ultimately nudged me off the fence and into the operating theater. And while I'll never play basketball again, at least I'll be able to get up out of a chair without wincing in agony.
This is approximately what my new hip will look like, by the way. I wish it could glow in the dark like this x-ray, but I can't be that lucky.
But when you dunk off one leg, that leg will twist in the socket like a mortar and pestle, with each twist grinding a bit of cartilage into nothing. And when you combine thousands of those twists over years of basketball with the odd now-and-again acute trauma -- such as the occasional undercut causing me to crash to the ground -- you end up with bone-on-bone severe degenerative osteoarthritis by your mid-thirties. This means that it's hard to walk, or sit, or drive, or sleep without some form of pain. Sometimes, the pain localizes around the knee, while other times it undulates like a lava lamp from the hip to the ankle. It's unpredictable, it's unrelenting, it doesn't respond well to medication, and it pisses me off to no end.
So on August 13th, after hemming and hawing for a couple of years, I'm planning to go under the knife downstate for an anterior left hip replacement. I'm anxious and nervous about that kind of surgery at my age, but when life starts to be negatively impacted on almost every level, it's time to take a drastic step. While it's morbid to say that I don't know how much longer I have to live, when the issue of quality of life is raised, it's a major consideration that ultimately nudged me off the fence and into the operating theater. And while I'll never play basketball again, at least I'll be able to get up out of a chair without wincing in agony.
This is approximately what my new hip will look like, by the way. I wish it could glow in the dark like this x-ray, but I can't be that lucky.
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