And then what happened?

So, two bullets dodged, it appears, in the last week. One you already know about, the purported cardiac scare, which most likely was something else -- perhaps esophageal spasms, said my primary, whom I saw yesterday for a followup. Makes sense, since intermittently I suffer from GERD. I'll be seeing the cardiologist on Thursday, and hope he'll concur.

The other thing I hadn't spoken of here yet. It's this: On the Thursday evening following my hospital overnighter, I was getting out of my recliner (powered by weight shift, not motor), and felt a stab of pain in my left groin. The same kind of pain I'd felt leading up to my left hip replacement. Walking off felt... wrong. Over the next day or two, I continued to have frequent pain in that area, as well as on the outside of the hip and down the thigh, especially after even relatively short bouts of walking, and I noticed that I was toeing my left foot in and swinging the leg oddly inward.

Yikes! Had my fake hip flaked out? Would I need revision surgery? Crap! Nooooooo!!

It was somewhat encouraging that the pain wasn't overwhelming, and that other than the gait oddity and the discomfort the joint appeared to be functioning normally -- I could walk, take stairs, bend over, and so forth. Also, as the days passed, the discomfort seemed to be lessening, and in the last day or two the in-toeing seems to have dwindled away.

I brought this up to my primary yesterday. He said if a replacement goes bad it's normally either right afterward or many years down the line; also that, as I'd thought, if apparatus or bone had broken down I should be in a heckuva lot more pain. He did a couple of manipulations that didn't trouble me other than minor discomfort at the extreme of moving my bent knee inward. I should have been way more hurting if the hip had gone kerblooey, he said.

His take was that it's likely to have been something like an adductor spasm. This is normally a product of overuse but could be a consequence of prolonged sitting, which I've been doing a lot of in recent days, for work and other reasons. In any case, I'll be seeing the orthopedist who did the replacement tomorrow morning; I want the hip x-rayed just to be sure there's nothing more serious going on. But the gradual but real improvement makes me hopeful.

Now, let's hope the old "troubles come in threes" thing is malarkey!