So what is it like to live with artificial hips for a decade? When people ask me how they are my answer is invisible. I don’t feel bionic, I don’t feel anything, really. They just do their thing.
I am careful, generally, avoiding stressing them out. That means I stopped skiing, risk reward not being there. Otherwise hiking, biking, carrying things and physical work like carpentry and digging holes are all as easy and natural as forever. My 10 year X-rays show no wear on my plastic washer and nothing needing course correction.
I’ve made some mistakes and gotten away with them. Probably the worst was a bicycle crash where I used a straight leg to avoid a face plant where the speed and angle were such that I broke my leg (tibia) and sent the rest of the force through my hip into my back which got severely tweaked. No damage to the hip at all, tough metal vs more fracture prone ceramic probably being an important factor. The leg was another journey into rehab.
I also once made the mistake of using my artificial hip as a fulcrum, bending something over y upper leg which differentially stressed its setting in the bone. That scared me, I was sore for a couple of weeks before the normal invisibility returned.
I found infrared saunas to be disconcerting. I got the feeling something was wrong, like I was getting too hot from the inside out. Regular saunas are just fine. Otherwise I never had an instance of feeling the hips being too cold or responsive to altitude or humidity. So there I feel unlimited. Maybe some brands of IR sauna are ok. Again risk / reward. I just don’t go.
Finally Covid. I had one really bad day of Omicron where my whole body ached but most of all my hips. They throbbed constantly, it was so intense. My thoughts turned dark and even paranoid and I wondered if somehow my prosthesis was getting destabilized by the mysterious spike protein. Fortunately the next day my pain went from a 10 to a 2 and the disease from existential to a bad cold. I think the hips are a little more resilient than my psyche.
Since I do a minimum of 1000 miles a year on my bicycle and a decent amount of hiking my legs and glutes have returned to their former solidity. Artificial hips naturally have no internal resistance so my range of motion is excellent, touching toes, half lotuses, squats and the like.
The moral of this story, from someone now in their 70s, is the technology is amazing. If you do the work up front to regain 100% of your capacity and pay attention ever so slightly as life goes on you will leave the land of the disabled. Nobody who ever meets me imagines I have these things inside. Well I did get strip searched at a backwater airport in Asia once. You can’t fool those scanners.
