My vacation was pretty fun, but I didn't get to do near as much as I'd hoped to. I had planned on going zip lining and parasailing and a lot more, but instead I mostly got to sit by the pool with my cane nestled beside me. Even swimming was pretty difficult, much to my dismay. On the bright side, the arm that held the cane was not the arm that was dislocating, so I was at least somewhat evened out. It was a great vacation though, and I met a nice couple from Ontario.
When we came back, I was very ready to start my year at school. I've always been ridiculously excited for school, starting in about June. When the textbook lists come out, I usually spend about two hours just standing in the bookstore being excited and happy that I get to start school again, so I was so pumped to go back. We lived quite close to the school so I got my UPass for the bus and got my backpack all ready and got ready to go. I still was working from home at this point because it was quite hard to move around, but I thought if I could get to school, maybe I'd be able to get a little better and actually start working in the office again. Boy, was I wrong. I had three classes, and they were all Software Engineering classes because the Human Computer Interaction concentration still didn't exist at this point. My profs were all very understanding of my ailment, though I still had no idea what was wrong with me. Every day I went to class, one of them being a class with one of my good friends Ian. I would usually do okay getting there, and I would start getting sore during class, and then when class was over I would hobble over to the bus stop which would take about 20 minutes, and then wait for the bus to take me home. Once I got home I would nap and then do my homework and then go to bed. This got increasingly harder over the weeks. I'd try to fit as much work in as possible too, because I needed to make some money and I really like work, but it was difficult because I was in so much pain and was so tired already.
Early in the semester, I got a couple more tests done. One of them was an MRI where they had to stick a needle in my hip and inject dye beforehand, much like the one I got in my shoulders a while ago. It was painful. I thought it was painful when it went into my shoulder, but that was nothing compared to this. My friend who is a nursing student brought me, and I feel like I'm forever in her debt because of it, because she was amazing. She gave me candy and told me I did awesome and took my mind off it... she was perfect. The second test was a bone density test, where you lay on a bed and they take a massive camera machine and spend about three hours taking random pictures of you. You can't move for the whole thing and the machine is about a centimetre away from you. Josh took me to that and he looked a little freaked out watching it, but I'm an imaging pro, so I was all ready and just let it happen. After these tests were done, I got told that I would get an appointment with my new surgeon soon, but he looks at each case himself and he was on vacation, so I would have to wait.
At about this point, my family and I started realizing that school might be a little too much for me at this point, so I had to unfortunately accept the fact that I was going to need to drop the semester until this got fixed. This was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me. So in October, I bowed out of school and got my tuition for the year back. I was devastated. I really wanted to keep working, but it got harder and harder to hold my laptop to be able to work, and to sit up for long periods of time, so I eventually had to accept the fact that I also unable to work until I got this fixed too. So now I was basically sitting on my ass until this got fixed. I can't do that; I am the type of person who needs something on the go all the time or I get really upset and depressed. Josh and I ended up moving back into my house with my parents so that they could help take care of me.
It was around this time, the time that my life seemed to have come to a crashing halt, that I got the date of my surgeon appointment. December 13th, 2010. Keep in mind, I got this problem halfway through August. This might seems like a ridiculously short time to everyone else, but I was living in crippling pain every day, so this was an eternity to me. I was even on Percocets and long lasting Oxycontin pills to try to deal with the pain, and it wasn't working that well. I waited with baited breathe for this appointment, and then Mom, Dad, Josh, and I leapt into the car and drove to meet my newest surgeon.
Once again, I seemed to have lucked out with surgeons. This man is well known for doing certain hip surgeries, and he seems to have taken some sort of course (or maybe teaches it) on how to be the nicest hip surgeon in the world. He checks out all my tests with us and then gives us the news: I have a labral tear in my hip. I know you all know what this means, but I'll tell you anyway. A labral tear is where the cartilage that surrounds the inner part of the joint rips. The funny part of this: my tear is completely separate from the rest of my health problems, I just happened to get it. Out of bad luck apparently, no one really knows, but I find this a little bit funny because this wouldn't happen to anyone but me. Normally it happens to really active people and God knows I'm not active. He seemed shocked that I managed to tear it by walking through the mall (apparently I was power shopping). Anyway, he said there was a couple of ways to fix it. There was an arthroscopy method where they went in the some cameras and some other tools and stitched the tear back up, much like the arthroscopy method in which they did my shoulder. Or they could replace my hip completely with a synthetic hip (not metal, because if I get pregnant someday that would be VERY bad for my body). He said that, though the second method would for sure fix it, I would need to get the replacement changed every 10 or so years because they wear out. So he would prefer to do the first method, even though the odds that it would actually fix it were quite slim. This isn't exactly a good thing to hear in my opinion, though my family felt quite confident about it, so we decided to go ahead and book me for the arthroscopy.
We left feeling pretty confident that I would get fixed one way or another, though it would be a little ways down the road. The surgery was booked for May, 2011. I was ready to get going and have this recent health problem fixed, but I sure wasn't ready for what was in store for me in the upcoming months.
