The hip joint is shot

I am a 1943 Grant, in reasonably good condition. After a long test drive, I was recently driven off the lot by Karen Marie Werve, who married me with an admonition: “I want 30 more years.”
I feel good about that warranty. All my parts are ‘43s, and I still would take them on a long desert drive at night without fear of breaking down.

But there is wear and tear, and an occasional malfunction. The prostate went three years ago, because of cancer, and so I can’t shift gears as smoothly as I used to.

Now it is a hip. The left one. The doctor said, “The hip is shot.” The shock absorber is gone. Xrays show a sheet of white where once was a gray half-moon of cartilage separating the white ball socket in the pelvis and the ball joint at the top of the leg. My steering has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years, and my ride is very rough, even on smooth highways. Every step is a pain.

So the original hip joint is coming out, this Thursday. Sixty-two years is not bad service for a part that gets as much daily pounding as a hip. Its replacement, made of titanium and composites, is estimated to last 20 years. How’s that for human durability?

I will miss the original. The procedure involves sawing off the old, worn out ball joint, at the top of the femur. I asked the surgeon, in our pre-op meeting, if I could bring it home. “No,” he said. “But in 1955, I got to bring my appendix home in a jar,” I protested. “No,” he said.

Affection develops for things that serve us well. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a farewell to a set of Michelins that served me for 100,000 miles. How many miles does the hip joint have on it? No way to know. Now it will disappear into some disposal process, the same way the Michelins went into a recycling machine. I want to pat it on its worn-out head for all the years and fun, the playgrounds, running, swimming, sports, hiking, etc., that it made possible.

I am hoping for a spinal block instead of the general anesthesia, and my orthopedist said I qualified for the “cementless” procedure, which I had hoped for also. Four days in the hospital, rounds of therapy, then either home or to a therapy facility for a few days, then home in time for Christmas. There will be a period of restricted activity and movement, which I intend to parlay into getting waited on hand and foot. A fine thing: a beautiful woman drives you off the lot one week, then two weeks later you drag her into the shop for hip surgery.

A friend from college days has had not one, but two, hip replacements. He said the first two weeks I will feel lousy, then uncomfortable for two weeks, then a shift into steady recovery. I am aiming to be ready for the stairs to my second-floor office when the spring semester begins in late January, and to move furniture, lug around potted plants, and go for long walks for the next 30 years, at any hour that Karen chooses.