I'm a hip chick!

I'm finally home after hip replacement surgery. I'm not 100% yet but I'm slowly getting there.

My surgery was July 6th in John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Which turned out to be a good time to be in an air-conditioned hospital.

If you ever need joint replacement surgery this is where to do it. If I hadn't been cut open, woken up every 4 hours to give me medicine or poke me to take blood and felt crappy, I would have thought I was in a hotel. I was in the Wenz Orthopedic Unit. This unit was built in honor of Dr. Wenz that died in 2004 after a car accident and was the head of orthopedic surgery at 40 years old. He also invented the type of surgery I had which is considered a minor invasive surgery. The top of your leg bone is cut off and a metal part is installed all thru a 4" incision as opposed to a 12" incision as it is usually done. How they can cut the top of your leg bone and insert a big metal apparatus thru that little hole is beyond me.

Dr. Mears in the video was my doctor. The unit has 10 private rooms, hard wood floors, cherry cabinets, flat screen TVs, DVD player, a guest sleeping sofa and a mini-fridge. I was going to take pictures but didn't feel up to it and thought there would be some online but there aren't any. My room was in front of the nurses station so the nurses were always there. John Hopkins is a teaching hospital so there were plenty of cute young doctors watching over me.

Two days after the surgery everything was going fine but all of a sudden my heart rate stared to go up like crazy. Nobody could explain why. One time I had been lying in bed all day and my heart rate went up to 160 which is the heart rate of someone running. They poked every vein in my arms attached every cable to my chest and made every test imaginable and nothing was wrong. I was taken to the Intensive Care Unit where they could monitor me constantly. They were worried I was having a heart attack. Fortunately everything was ok. They figured that I was anemic (probably because of all the blood test they did) and in pain and that was the cause of my increased heart rate. After a few days my heart rate slowed down somewhat and after 5 days, I was transferred to a rehab facility. I didn't do much walking in the hospital because of the heart problem and there are stairs in my house so I needed to get a little better before going home.