The last couple of weeks have been rather emotional on me. I've been to several doctors and they each seem to say a different thing, and each one makes me more and more upset. It seems that none of them can agree on anything other than the fact that my hip is definately not a normal one. And to be quite frank, we already knew that.
I think the only way to explain anything is to start from the beginning and work up to the present, but like I've said, it's been rough on me, and I won't get into too much detail just for the sake that it gets confusing to me and I may not remember much else.
We went to see the specialist on the 12th, and my parents and I were very impressed with him. He explained things down so we could understand them and made us feel a little bit more at ease. He looked at my x-rays and told us that it looked like I had some dead bone in my hip where the blood circulation was getting to. He also told us that the ball of the hip was flattening out and that I shouldn't be walking on it much. He told us to get a MRI and then see what would be next.
Got the MRI done last Friday, I ended up missing the entire day of school that day when I should have been back at 11:30 in the morning. Found I was claustrophobic. They ended up sending me to a place in Wichita that had an open MRI machine. I got through that 30 minutes by thinking of forensics and debate things and almost ended up falling asleep at the very end.
Monday, we saw another doctor. To make it plain and simple, I wasn't impressed and neither were my parents. It felt that all he deemed important was to make himself look good and important, when in reality we couldn't understand hardly anything he was saying, and he was making us feel confused. He checked my range of motion, and then preceded to say that my range of motion was really quite well and that he wasn't concerned about that...next he told us that my right leg was slightly shorter than the left by like an inch and that it would be really beneficial to go and get a lift put in my shoes so I could walk easier....then he went on boasting about how he had done work when he was a resident at some place that was big and fancy and how he knew all this wonderful and great surgeons that could help and how he could get in contact with them...and then he told us that we should look into this one surgery, that had this huge name to it, that was extremely complicated and that only a handful of people in the U.S. could perform. And the closet one was an 11 hour drive. He kept repeating that we should stray away from thinking of a hip replacement. He also loosely threw around Legg-Calve-Perthes Disease as an issue.
There was probably more to the appointment that he said, but I mostly tuned him out....I really wanted to smack him.
Yesterday, we went to yet another doctor. We waited close to two hours before he got to us, but he seemed to be the most helpful of them all. He stated the obvious once again, that I had a bad hip. And told my mother and I that I was in between a rock and small place. He basically said that the most useful thing they could do would to be replace the hip. He asked about Shriner's from eight years ago. It made me feel a little better when he started rattling off doctors at Shriner's and listed the one that I had, and to find out he had even worked with the doctor. He basically told mom and I that he wanted me to go back to Shriner's and get evaluated and see what they think of a hip replacement.
We called St. Louis on the way home from the doctor's last night, left a message. They called today, and mom said the earliest they could get me in was January 21st. Needless to say, mom is still trying to get me in sooner than that.
I've probably missed a few things here and there, but I'll try to keep everything updated as much as I can.
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