Hip Hip Hooray!

This unit in our STEAM class Disease, we learned about how to classify diseases by geography, geo-economics, transmission, and cause. We also learned about each body system and how diseases can affect them. For our Action Project, we created a patient profile for a personal contact with a disease that has affected their lives. I chose to interview my aunt ML, who has had both of her hips replaced because of arthritis. I chose her because she still has complications from her surgeries, and though they have been helpful with some issues, they have also created many more. She was also a nurse for her entire career, which made it much more interesting because she has been on both the treatment and recovery side. In this project, I had some issues with drawing the patient's body. Drawing an accurate body turns out to be a lot more difficult than I expected. To fix this, I tried to base my drawings off of photos of the body instead of drawings.

One of the most common causes of arthritis is repeated movements for long periods. People who work on their feet all day, or move around a lot, are likely to be affected by arthritis. People whose diets are lacking omega 3 oils and women who have had children are also more susceptible than the average person, but anyone, especially people over 50, can get it. Mary Lu worked as a nurse for her entire career, lifting people in and out of beds, on her feet all day, and twisting back and forth between patients and computers, which is the reason she has arthritis today. In the beginning, most people with arthritis think that they just need to keep exercising, or that the pain just came with age. Of course, it can often end up a lot worse.

Common symptoms for people suffering from arthritis are pain, limitation of movement, and swelling in the affected area. Often occurring are bone spurs, which are small growths on the surface of the bone that can limit movement. They can also become very painful, as they did with Mary Lu, and stop movement in certain directions. “I don’t think anything makes it worse besides movement. The most painful for me was getting out of the car. One of the big spurs that I had was on the top of the ball of the hip, so anything moving up or down was especially painful. I started feeling like there was glass in my hips and joints, and it was painful every time I moved.”

Arthritis is especially difficult because the only long-term solution is surgery. What doctors tell you to do is heat the painful areas, or to keep moving, but that doesn’t really fix it. It’s all temporary. For people with bone spurs (6), it can be distinctly hard, because there are no ways to physically change the surface of the bone other than replacing the bone completely. ML had issues with both of her hip replacements (5) and is still having issues with her right hip. After her first surgery, she recovered in about a week, which is considerably fast, until her psoas muscle (1) ruptured. She couldn't lift her leg at all, and it took about 5 months to fully heal. During her second surgery, her piriformis muscle (2) was reattached to the head of the femur (3) slightly twisted. The muscle would press back on her sciatic nerve (4), which is the largest nerve in the body. This inhibited movement and caused great pain, especially with twisting movements in the hip. Even with these difficult issues, ML say,s “I would say I am very lucky even though I had issues both times, I would still not be able to do what I do without the science and technology today. I am very grateful.”

MDS, Hip Replacements, (January 19, 2016)

Because she is also a nurse, I think ML has a unique view of her disease, because she has treated people with similar issues. She had an advantage during her recovery because she understood the importance of each part, even small. While she has seen patients who often forgo physical therapy, she knows exactly what each exercise is doing to help her. She can be a bigger part of her own recovery, by making a much more concentrated effort on what she knows will work.

Works Cited
MDS. "ML Hip Interview." Telephone interview. 16 Jan. 2017.

"Questions and Answers about Hip Replacement." National Institutes of Health. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, July 2016. Web. 13 Jan. 2017.

"Skeletal System." InnerBody. InnerBody. Web. 14 Jan. 2017.