My Mexican Medical Odyssey (or “How I came to Mexico to have my hips replaced”)

I wasn’t particularly surprised when I got the news, none the less fear did rise up in me. I have never had an operation in my life. It has been my belief for many years and it is confirmed these days statistically, that people die in hospitals! What I mean to say is that people die because of various negligence’s of patients while they in the hospital. Bad diagnosis, wrong treatment, poor professional work, drugs and the list goes on with probably the most prolific cause of people dying in hospitals is from something different from what they initially went there to be treated for. Go in for stitches and come out with staff infection. Those are reasons I have avoided hospitals my whole life. Now I am looking at an unavoidable circumstance.

In 1995 I was in a pretty serious car crash where I exited unscathed, or so I thought. I did miss 3 months of work, but I had no broken bones just the physical trauma of being in a head on smash. My muscles were stiff and soar to the point where I could not exit a bath tub after returning home from the emergency room. During my massage and chiropractic rehabilitation was the feeling in my left hip that it was not quite all together. It was like a knuckle that needed to be cracked, pulled on and put back in its rightful place.

By 2001 I was experiencing some odd symptoms with numbing pain in my buttocks that ran down my left leg to the knee. I went and had x-rays which revealed nothing conclusive from the doctor’s standpoint. Because the occurrences were scattered and not continuous, I “powered through” with exercise and activities, and while I was not inhibited anymore, it was there in the background, that feeling of a chip or something in the hip. A chip in the hip.

In February of 2009 things began to change. I was still walking everyday, but I was noticing more and more stiffness in both my hips, but mainly on the left side. By August of 2009 I had to give up daily walks. The pain was inhibiting movement as well as increasing in intensity.

The news I received came as a result of simple x-rays. One glance at the x-rays by the orthopedic surgeon and the definitive statement he made, “you need both hips replaced” was both alarming and calming at the same time. I finally received a diagnosis that was definitive and concrete; even I could see in the x-ray the bone on bone contact in my ball and socket joints, the source of jolting pain as well as numbing radiant agony keeping me from sleep.

That was the calming part. The alarming part was the idea of having part of my bones hacked out, the extended recuperative down time and how am I going to pay for it?

Next blog .... Health insurance in Mexico