Hips *DO* Lie, After All!

Posted on by Accidental Spacegirl

Well, maybe not my hip, but my crappy consultant. You know: the one who showers in Daily Fail and walks out on his patients when they’re mid-sentence answering his questions. The one who ignores your partner/spouse/relative/carer and talks to you as though he’s addressing a toddler.

Oh. Did I not talk about him in detail before? How remiss of me – but that’s for another blog post.

Essentially, he’s the idiot who told me my hip was crumbling and not healing and yadda yadda yadda. Way to cheer a lady up! Anyway, he was so disgustingly rude to my husband and dismissive of me, that I put in a complaint to PALS and demanded a second opinion.

I GOT A SECOND OPINION!

It didn’t even take long to be referred to a different consultant! We had a chat and he sent me for an x-ray, and guess what?

He doesn’t know what the hell my original consultant was on about!

What did the first consultant want to misdiagnose me for? More money for a needless operation, I suspect (he also works privately and likes to be paid. Not that I blame him, but if he’s going to operate on and mutilate me then I’m a monkey’s uncle).

It turns out that my hip is mending just fine, thank you very much. It’s healing slowly, but it’s healing. I saw the x-ray myself, and even my uneducated eyes can see that the fracture is knitting together perfectly well. Knitting slowly, but knitting anyway.

I do need another operation, but that’s six to nine months down the line, and it’s to remove the cannulated screws because they’re hurting me. There is nothing wrong with my hip at all. It turns out that the screws are only protruding because the internal swelling has gone down, and it’s even possible that I should have had shorter screws drilled into me – we’ll never know, really.

When it happens, the operation to remove the screws and un-Cyborg me will take about ten minutes, and it will be a day case. I won’t need to stay in hospital. In a way I’m going to miss being a partial Cyberwoman, but on the other hand it’s going to be wonderful not to be in constant pain any more. Of course, I’ll still be disabled, and I will always be a part-time wheelie (thanks very not much, epilepsy and ME!) but the pain that is currently plaguing me will be gone, once I recover from the operation.

I knew I was right to get a second opinion…

13 thoughts on “Hips *DO* Lie, After All!”

  1. Thank goodness you’ve now got a correct diagnosis and a much clearer view forward. I’m so glad to hear that your fracture is indeed knitting, albeit slowly. I hope your recovery progresses smoothly and that you are out of pain as soon as possible.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Thanks Lucy! I just had a feeling that something was missing from what I was being told (on top of the fact that he’s just a rude and arrogant man). Knowing what I know now, it makes me wonder just how many patients he’s needlessly mutilated for the love of money. I hope someone else complains about him and that he gets struck off!

        Liked by 1 person

  4. Knitting together sounds good. Your blog has provided good information to tuck away. A daughter’s middle school classmate broke his hip just last week — sports injury. I told her it was a big deal, but I didn’t know quite how big until now. Blessings on your continued recovery!!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Thank you for stopping by! Apparently the hip is the bone that takes the longest to heal, but I’m also fortunate that I didn’t break it badly enough to need a hip replacement, which might actually heal faster but is a serious operation; the cannulated screws took about half an hour to put in, but a hip replacement takes quite a lot longer and carries far more health risks.

      I hope your daughter’s schoolmate hasn’t broken it too badly, and that he’ll be back on his feet sooner rather than later. His age will certainly go in his favour with the healing process!

      Liked by 1 person

  5. That is pretty good news about the healing, but you really shouldn’t have had to get a second opinion in the first place. It’s shameful to think of how hard so many of our wonderful NHS staff do work, and then you get people like this who are basically taking the p*** and wasting everyone’s time!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I felt a genuine dislike for this individual from the moment I met him in hospital. When he shook my hand, it was like touching soggy lettuce, and his attitude stank of Tory gammon. Fortunately, he wasn’t the one to operate on me – that was an extremely pleasant man of African descent, whose handshake I could trust (warm, firm grip. He wasn’t exactly unpleasant to look at either lol).

      My case is in the hands of a lovely Indian gentleman now. The only issue I have with him is his accent, and that’s only because I’m partially deaf and struggle to understand him! I have to go back for an x-ray next month, to see if we’re any closer to removing the screws from my femur. I trust his judgement completely.

      Like

      1. It’s typical of the Empire hangover isn’t it that some of the British people in these jobs are useless? And we have people from India and Africa who are so much better here, serving us, instead of the people of India and Africa who need them just as much, if not more than, we do.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Without immigrant doctors, surgeons, registrars etc. the NHS would collapse! Many of these individuals are more highly skilled than our home grown medical teams: how many people can say that their lives were saved by a Brit? I’m still here thanks to a Mexican, an African and various Muslims – also a Greek/Cypriot neurologist who worked for years to get my epilepsy medications just right. None of them get to choose who they save; they’ve probably all suffered verbal abuse from Biffers, UKIP/EDL thugs and Leavers.

        I still don’t understand why people want us to go back to post-war Britain, just for the sake of “taking our country back” (translation: “Make Britain white again”) – do they really not realise they’re shooting themselves in the foot and condemning the next generation to a way of existing that our grandparents fought hard to eradicate when they rebuilt this country (alongside the Windrush generation, who were just happy to have jobs and a good house to live in)?

        I don’t usually get political, but I owe these dedicated people my life and have a disabled son to worry about. It’s very scary out there at the moment!

        Like

      3. It’s scary out there even as someone who is fully able. Part of the problem has been the way that university has been treated – so many subjects which don’t need to be degrees made into degrees, and the requirements for subjects such as nursing and medicine being as strict as they are. I understand that standards are needed but we should not just be judging on people’s academic grades!

        Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.