I’ve had ongoing pain in one hip (and sometimes leg) for a while now, and finally made it into the Orthopedics office at the beginning of the year to address the issue. Noting that I highly recommend against dealing with pain for “a while”; I should have gone in sooner, so I won’t bother listing excuses.
After eight weekly visits for physical therapy (PT), there was some improvement, but also ongoing stiffness and pain, so my doctor sent me for an MRI. That was an interesting experience in several ways, starting with how I arrived twenty minutes early but checked in fifteen minutes late. (Someone forgot to unlock the main door.)
MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and there’s a fascinating explanation on Wikipedia about how it uses magnetic fields and radio waves to map out soft tissues. I was warned that it’s noisy… a “cacophony” of sound. The office fortunately provided both ear plugs (standard) and a headset (apparently this varies); the operator was able to talk to me via the headset.
I was concerned that I would get bored; I was told walking in that I needed to try to lay still for thirty-five minutes (without a book or cat!). Instead, I found the process interesting. Before each scan, the automated system told me the expected duration, and I almost immediately noticed that the sounds for each scan, and even within some of the scans, were different, and the direction the sound came from varied. After some thumps and murs and hums, I was released back into the world to await my results.
The scan results were sent to me online, followed fairly quickly by my doctor’s assessment, translating medical-ese into, well, slightly less medical-ese: “chronic degenerative changes to your labrum and hip impingement”. That’s about what it sounds like… I scheduled a follow-up appointment for today, and she clarified that it’s essentially wear and tear on my hip joint. We rolled straight into the possibility she had mentioned before scheduling the MRI: a cortisone shot.
Alas, it will be a couple weeks before I really know the impact of the shot, it takes the steroids a bit of time to do their magic to reduce the inflammation in the area. I was impressed with my doctor’s bedside manner, she talked through each part of the injection process as she approached it, from the pinch of the needle going in, to the sensations I’d feel as the different numbing agents were released into my system.
Now I wait and see.