Today was a day to celebrate the marvels of modern technology, and enjoy the peacefulness of nothing, simultaneously.
*****
Sonia was born with a bad hip. "Congenital Hip Displacement" is the term in English for it; essentially, her right femur was not hooked into the socket joint in her waist. This is much more common than I would've imagined before I met her and learned about the condition. If not detected early a child will never walk. Fortunately, Sonia's parents' family doctor alerted them to the condition when she was around three months of age (now, it is routinely checked for after birth in the hospital). They popped the femur bone in the best they could and little baby Sonia spent the next several months in a full body cast while the joint formed.
It wasn't perfect but for Peru in 1973 it was pretty damned good, and Sonia had a fairly normal childhood. She did all the things that kids do: skate, ride bicycle, swim, play sports, dance. It was never a serious issue, not when the family moved to La Paz, Bolivia, or when her and her sister moved to the United States when she was 27. Her principal means of income for the first few months in Iowa City was newspaper delivery via bicycle. I met her two years later and aside from the scars, which I do remember she did explain to me but in typical male fashion do not remember the content thereof, had no idea of this issue. This is a woman that would dance salsa for hours on end in high heels; nothing to worry about there!
It wasn't until after we were married and were moving our stuff into our first apartment that I actually recall any sort of permanent condition being mentioned. Her mother (it's always the mother, isn't it?) kept urging her not to carry even slightly heavy things. I asked Sonia why and she said because of her hip, which she explained to me (and I remembered this time). Her and I both dismissed it and proceeded about our lives. Niko was introduced to us not long after; we were sure to inquire as to whether her hip would be an issue in child delivery and upon being assured it wouldn't, put the issue again to the back of our minds.
*****
All parents, and especially modern day parents, however, know that children change everything. A baby MUST be carried; there is no other means of transport. And what starts out as a light object goes quite quickly to being, to put it mildly, slightly heavy. And I emphasize here "modern day parents" because between my generation and my children's came the rise of the ubiquitous car seat, required by law, carried absolutely everywhere (one of my friends had to have back surgery in her thirties, largely attributed to this syndrome). Sonia's mother's warning which we had ignored for a few hours on moving day was now routinely ignored as a matter of course. Orlando came to us a couple years later, and thus the warnings were roundly violated for four straight years.
Towards the end of 2009 we got our first sign that things weren't so okay. Sonia and her sister were on their way to work when their car flipped over. Luckily I wasn't working that day and was able to meet Sonia and accompany her to the emergency room, where she complained of a headache and some pain in her hip. They checked her for a concussion and then as a precautionary measure decided to check x-ray her hip. The emergency room physician wasn't an expert in orthopedics but was sufficiently concerned by what he saw to refer us to one.
It wasn't good. The doctor was frankly shocked that Sonia was walking, let alone actively raising two young children. The wear and tear of the previous years had fomented a serious case of arthritis; there was virtually no tissue between the femur and the hip, and to make things worse, the femur wasn't even really in the hip. Furthermore, he informed us that there was no way to correct this short of surgery, and that even he, who routinely performed hip replacements, would not be able to operate on Sonia's hip due to the complicated nature of her condition.
"So what do we do?" we asked.
"I'll prescribe Celebrex," he said. "That will ease the pain for a while. But eventually, I'd say a maximum of 10 to 15 years, she'll have to have surgery."
We were hoping the hip would give her the maximum. But life with Niko and Orlando is far from ideal, especially when your husband decides that a masters degree in linguistics is a good idea with two kids, and after years of fighting the insurance company over the Celebrex, it was becoming a matter of not if there was pain but how much. As I prepared to graduate from grad school this spring, Sonia seemed to come to some kind of inner resolution. She asked the doctor to give her the names of doctors who could perform the procedure she needed.
*****
Fortunately, we live in Iowa City, Iowa, a town of 70,000 with a hospital that belongs in a major metropolitan area. Our appointment was July 17. Dr. Callaghan himself, the very designer of the parts that Sonia needed, came in after a while attended by his retinue of residents and students (Iowa is a teaching hospital, after all). He spent about twenty minutes with us; he pulled and prodded on Sonia's leg; he explained to her the risks inherent in all surgeries; he recommended she have the surgery; he said he had performed over 6500 of them. Sonia will probably deny it but she had tears of gratitude in her eyes:
This man understood her pain. Moreover, he could fix it.
To be continued....the author is going to bed :))))
