A simple DIY guide to hip replacement

Jan’s still going well. She went to her GP who examined and dressed the operation wound and pronounced it good. He told her she should be walking without the crutches now.

She’s managing fine crutchless around the house, but is using one crutch for longer walks. It’s still a bit painful, but as I told her cheerfully: “There’s no gain without pain!” You can guess how well that went down. So the tap, tap, tap has been replaced by tap . . . tap . . . tap! 

I was doing some research into Jan’s total hip replacement and found an excellent guide to doing the operation. Jan’s prosthesis is a DePuy Triloc femur uncemented. There’s a Pinnacle 52mm solid cup with a poly hooded liner and metal head.

The maker of the hip is DePuy – and they publish a very handy Surgical Technique .pdf guide to using their gear. It’s an easy-to-read step-by-step booklet. There are even some interesting videos to watch (although I haven’t yet summoned up the courage for those). Here’s an example from the guide.

“For the posterolateral approach, place the patient in the lateral decubitus position. Ensure that . . .  the patient is secured to the table to  improve accuracy. Center the skin incision over the greater trochanter, carrying it distally over the femoral shaft for about 15cm and proximally in a gently curving posterior arc of about 30 degrees for about the same distance. (Figure 9). Incise the iliotibial tract distally  . .  develop the incision proximally by blunt dissection of the gluteus maximus along the direction of its fibres.”

Highly-paid doctors, like lawyers, like to use a lot of complicated jargon so ordinary people can’t see how easy their jobs are.

As any sub-editor would know, this jargon could be easily be replaced by two simple sentences. “Lay the patient on her side and tie her to the table so she can’t wriggle around. Make a big cut starting at the top of the leg and going back a bit into the bum cheek.” 

When it comes to inserting the metal bits, I like the way the guide advises “using moderate mallet blows, advance the stem into position.” Hmmm what’s the definition of moderate?

Anyway, I reckon I could do one of these after studying the videos and getting the special tools (a bigger mallet). I suppose the patient would need some sort of anaesthesia. Panadeine Forte? I guess Reta McLeod knows a bit more about this.