The road to surgery and beyond...Part 3 - Tests

Waiting for Tests

This gave the doc some time to reflect on my hip “issues”. It is a well known fact that hip pain can be referred back pain, that’s fine I understand but please don’t forget that I have very limited passive movement in my hip joint. Surely that has got to count for something even if you aren’t totally convinced by my “my back is fine it’s my hip damit!”
It all came down to cost (the reason he had to reflect), whether I just got a hip MRI or if I got my lumbar spine done at the same time. They don’t like having to pay out lots of money for tests and MRIs aren’t the cheapest things in the world.
The good doc reflected and decided that both were warranted (I felt so special), and to make me even happier he informed me that I would need dye injected into my hip joint prior to the MRI-WHAAAAAAT? The cartilage in the hip joint needs dye so that it will show up properly in the images.

I had a bad experience with a previous MRI so I was freaking out about that and then freaking out about the intra-articular injection and also freaking out that the MRI would show nothing and then what would I do? Can you see I was worrying way way too much?

The test itself went well; the guy who did the injection into my hip (not the most wonderful thing to go through but certainly not undoable) was really nice and made me feel as relaxed as possible. The lady doing the MRI kept me calm and talked me through everything and all through the scan let me know that I was doing great and how far we were through and that she was getting good images etc and I felt so proud that I made it through the hour and a half-when you put your mind to something you can do it.
And then it was over, now all I had to do was wait for the results to come through…. And did I mention-they put some local anaesthetic in my hip and for the first time in so long I could tie my laces without that awful pain-amazing!

To be continued…