"Hips Don't Lie"

Team Miner, 

Jeff's home from the hospital - yay! He should never ever have to get another Neulasta shot ever - yay! It's actually and truly summer in SF - yay! Lydia is apparently teething again - meh. I have a torn labrum in my hip - boo! 

I guess I could end the post here, since that first paragraph sums it up, but I will explain a bit before I hit the hay. I'm a wee bit tired since Ms. L.M. Miner is sleeping quite a bit more fitfully than usual due to her current oral situation. 

I had my MRI on Thursday morning. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience. Jeff warned me that it requires lying very still in a tight space and that the machine is loud. I'm not claustrophobic, so I had no problem with the confined area. The tech gave me pretty serious noise-cancelling headphones, so the sounds, while loud, were of somewhat muted and mostly rhythmic clanging. The real upside of this procedure was that I had 45 minutes, totally alone, in which I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and maybe even fell asleep for a second. What a gift! The technician on the way out joked that new moms could come in and book MRIs just to get a little shut eye. I'd seriously consider it if it were always in-network and covered.

"I never really knew that she could dance like this
She makes a man want to speak Spanish"

So, the result of the MRI is that the labrum in my left hip socket is indeed torn.  It's a tiny little vertical tear, less than a centimeter long.  We can't be sure of what caused it, but it probably wasn't playing professional football a la Percy Harvin.  I think we can safely rule that out.  

In my case, it may have been a combination of developing extra flexible hips from gymnastics as a kid as well as the rather violent, impact-heavy exercise involved in that sport, followed by a series of teen years in which I logged a lot of mileage running, all of which primed my collagen for a tear while pregnant and carrying extra weight/going through labor.  (The fact that a certain newborn's head is in the 94th percentile did not come up in my discussion with the chiropractor, but I'm not going to rule out the possibility of guilting her for that when she is, perhaps, ready to give birth to her own child several decades from now.)

I haven't decided exactly what to do next.  At the moment it seems inevitable that I'll have an arthroscopic procedure sometime before the end of this year. The surgery itself does not sound so bad, but the recovery can take a long time.  And my pain level is tolerable now, but I definitely feel quite sore by the end of the day and my ability to play on the floor with the kiddos is becoming a bit compromised.  My goal for now is to explore all my options, take it easy on the exercise front, and hold off on any surgery until Jeff is done with chemo and at a time that is convenient (ha!) for my life.  

Sparing you any pictures of hip arthroscopy, you can thank me now or later,

Katina