For a Woman Your Age in Everyday Ramblings

So I went to see the doctor this last week about this sharp pain I am getting in my right thigh where it connects to my pelvis when I am in the process of standing up.

It is getting better but after my recent bout with, well, umm, cancer, I thought it might be a good thing to get it checked out. My regular doctor wasn’t available so I saw a young male resident. The rushed nurse who checked me in to the examining room said that based on my reported complaint they were going to send me down to x-ray for some images of my right hip to rule out osteoarthritis first and then I’d have the exam.

The doctor was a sweetie, very young and enthusiastic and interested and appreciative of yoga. He said his girlfriend was at an hour and a half pranayama class as we were speaking. But then he said, "We first we want to rule out bone issues and arthritis."

I wanted to tell him how much that assumption bothered me because I was absolutely certain what was wrong with me wasn’t arthritis but as I used to dance and my hips are often sore I though what the heck, as a side note, go for it, now I’ll have a baseline image for the future.

When I got up from the chair to go down to radiology my leg did what it has been doing and it was quite apparent to the doctor. I was relieved it presented in the office because there is only so well one can explain these things.

One day this young man will be 59 and hopefully he will remember how many times he used the term “in a woman your age” when his doctors start using something similar on him.

The report he wrote up for me later said…You have "minimal degenerative" changes in your hip joint; this means that you have a small amount of arthritis in your hip joint. It is such a small amount it is unlikely that this is the source of the hip pain that you described in clinic this week. We would anticipate such minimal changes in a woman your age….

He did manipulate my hips and legs through a full range of motion and could not reproduce the problem. My hip on the affected side did drop when I stood on the other leg though. He finally went and got his supervising physician (whom I had met during my melanoma extravaganza) and they agreed it was probably caused by the imbalance of protecting the left side of my upper back during the two months I was having or healing from the various procedures while continuing almost non-stop my normal level of activity and the slight correction to my gait I was making because of the developing bunion.

Olga told me recently that my right side seemed quite a bit more developed then my left and that my right ankle was stiff and not as responsive as my left and the massage therapist I saw two weeks ago said my right TA (which I later found out was my tibialis anterior muscle and tendon that is what starts on the inside front of the ankle and wraps diagonally across the front of the leg up to connect to the knee on the outside, basically your shin muscle) is way more developed on the right then the left.

While the doc was manipulating my leg, (luckily I was wearing pants), he was explaining all the things that go wrong with women’s hips including bursitis in the trochanter muscles. He was ruling them out while moving through various areas. It was actually interesting to me as a yoga teacher.

I was telling my class this week how glad I was that they were taking care of their hips because all these things sound pretty awful.

I am taking round the clock ibuprofen for a week or ten days and if it doesn’t get better they gave me a referral to Sports Medicine. Oh and I am supposed to work in my yoga practice on strengthening my left side and stretching my quads on the right.

So now I am awkwardly carrying my grocery bag (I use cloth bags) with my left hand and slinging my backpack over my left shoulder as well as balancing on my left leg alone when I think of it.

And I’ve given up taping my foot for the bunion. Kes found these combo toe spacer pads that also protect the callus on the big toe that are reusable, in a Foot Smart catalog that we are both looking at, but in the meantime I am using the gel toe spacers every few days and protecting the callus with moleskin when I have shoes on.

This whole experience is dramatic proof to me that all the parts of our bodies are dependent on other parts as well as the fact that we are interdependent with others of our species. :) The doctors, the yoga teacher, the massage therapist, the wonderful concerned family members… all a part of the web of caring for each other and making this world a better, more comfortable place to be in….

For a woman my age.