Steve Moseley

Though I cannot in good conscience recommend it, I find myself keenly qualified to help you break the same hip twice should that be your goal.

How I began what has become a bizarre experience was to fall in the evening on the day before Father’s Day. As a deaf, elderly wiener dog broke for daylight through a garage door mistakenly left up; I instinctively made a sudden athletic move and lunged to grab her.

That’s when I learned whatever few ‘sudden athletic move’ capabilities I ever possessed, if any, were long neutralized by the advancement of 73 summers.

The dog scampered away while I lay writhing in agony on the concrete driveway. A young, strapping neighbor heard the ruckus, rushed to my side, tugged at me maybe twice, gave up and fetched his daughter to help. Eventually this 6-foot-4, 240-pound carcass was righted.

Good Wife Norma, who fully retired four weeks earlier after 53 years a nurse, gave me the once-over upon her return home and declared herself uncertain if it was fractured or not. This being the cusp of Father’s Day weekend, I decided to suffer on until Monday, and then call the VA.

To say hobbling around on what was later confirmed to, indeed, have been a broken hip until Monday morning was excruciating. Needless to say this was my all-time worst Father’s Day in nearly 50 years.

Monday morning’s call to the VA was for naught when the human being I finally flushed from beneath endless recorded instructions pointed out this was a national holiday, Juneteenth. The VA was shut down.

Still hurting and now fully discouraged, at least I could still use the bathroom. Even this tiny comfort was snuffed out when, just after lunch that Monday, I tangled my feet and fell again. This time on rock-hard bathroom tiles.

Lying face down in a space little wider than my substantial girth, the only way to regain my feet was to howl like a banshee and turn over against the hip which had now been hammered in the exact same spot twice.

In the ensuing days hospital staff asked over and over, “How would you rate your pain right now on a scale of 1 to 10?” The answers were easy. Getting back to my feet from that bathroom floor taught me what ‘10’ feels like, so I now had a baseline.

Enough of this. GWN loaded my considerable carcass into the truck and straight to the hospital ER we went. Subsequent X-rays told the story; the right hip ball was fractured by the first fall, then crunched to chips and splinters by the second.

No fix to this baby, said the surgeon. That’s when I learned a bolt-on prosthetic device lay in this old poop’s immediate future. Immediate as in the very next morning.

An hour or so of slicing, hacking, hammering and sawing later it was over. The procedure, that is, not the pain.

In a nutshell the ball atop the femur was broken into pieces too badly to make repair a dumb idea. Also impossible.

So Dr. Koch and his assistant, the affable Sam, made an incision of some 5 inches over the hip, disjointed it, sawed off the ball at the neck, drove a shiny new ball assembly and attached shaft deep down the remaining bone, aligned everything just so, bolted or screwed or pinned the prosthesis down tight, reattached it to the socket, stapled the incision, washed up, took a smoke break maybe, and moved on to the morning’s next victim.

Back in my room after recovery, I arrogantly huffed this was no big deal. No big deal at all. Apparently I was more the tough guy than even I had always bragged. Then the morphine and oxycodone wore off and all remaining cockiness dissipated into thin air.

That first week had little to recommend it and the next was no better, but much progress has been noted since.

The hateful, clumsy, obtrusive walker is retired save for special occasions, getting in and out of the boat for instance, and physical therapy gets easier with every session.

Best of all, a loaner cane has restored a level of comfort and mobility I feared might be lost to me forever.

So there you have it, how one person is dealing with hip surgery.

Next, of course, is figuring out how to stop this global scourge of hip fractures in its tracks. I believe I can help there, too.

First, shoot all the wiener dogs.