Left PAO

Let’s back up. Bjinuz braces was surgery number 11 so what are numbers 1-10? How did all of this even happen? Since it is a protracted story, I’ll break it down by year over the next few days. These posts are the simple history of both PAOs and the related surgeries to give you a timeline and scope. The details and tools for recovery will follow. First up, the left PAO, but before I begin…

A note on objectivity

Sharing this history helps me be objective. It could be easy to get caught up in the day to day minutiae of this journey and wallow, be overwhelmed, and lose motivation. But being objective helps me see the whole picture, live in gratitude, and stay focused on my goals. This matters.

“Whenever you find yourself blaming providence, turn it around in your mind and you will see that what has happened is in keeping with reason.”

– Epictetus, Discourses, 3.17.1

I love a long game. It is one of the reasons I run ultras – a mental game against the self where gratitude for the journey is what will get me to the end and finish strong. One of my favorite pieces of imagery is that as I progress I emit a trail like a light bike in Tron, or a rainbow trail like Nyan Cat or Giant Realistic Flying Tiger. It is a trail of power that propels me forward and I can almost feel it, like a strong windy force. I do this when I run, work through a hard bike ride, and life moments like this. It makes me smile every time and immediately empowers me to keep going, like it is my own secret superpower. Picturing all that is behind me (rainbows, glowing lights, and all) helps me realize that what remains in front is so small in comparison.

So, recognizing progress objectively is important, especially at this stage where I am so close to the end, the darkest hour before dawn.

2018 – Left Hip Scope and PAO

This all started with me seeming to not recover properly from my daughter’s birth In 2015. Did my pelvis not close right? Did I tear something, like a hamstring attachment? There were so many weird things going on, I couldn’t tell what was what, I just knew something was not right. I spent time with my chiropractor and birth trauma PT, but nothing was working so I finally went to a hip and pelvis specialist and got proper MRIs and X-rays done. Red flags caused them to send me for a CT scan. And then in May I was diagnosed with bilateral hip dysplasia, torn labrums and other hip joint damage, and osteitis pubis. This was going to take several surgeries to repair, beginning on the left side with a hip scope and a PAO (periacetabular osteotomy).

What. The. Heck. At least I had an explanation.

In August we did the left hip scope followed by the left PAO a week later. It looked like this afterwards:

Over the next several months the bones healed from the PAO but my range of motion (ROM) decreased and I had terrible pinching in the joint. The hip capsule was thickening and scarring up so badly that I was standing as if my left leg were longer than the right. We had to fix this…in 2019.

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