possible hip surgery

Hey all~

I've been having hip pain for years, but thought it was due to the extra weight I was carrying around. I found that as I increased my exercise as part of my WLS journey, that the pain was getting worse. I did several weeks of PT with no success (actually made it worse sometimes). Tomorrow I go in for an arthogram and MRI. The orthopedist believes it's impingement which is the same issue that I had with both of my shoulders and resulted in surgeries to relieve the pain.

I'm not exercising much with the pain, but I am super concerned that the surgery will negatively impact my weight loss. Not sure exactly why? Maybe I'm just concerned about the possibility of another surgery?

Have any of you had a subsequent surgery (I'm 10 months out from RNY)? How did it impact your WLS progress? I'm about 30 lbs from my goal.

Thanks!

Funny you should ask - I actually had my hip replaced (technically I had a Birmingham Hip Resurfacing, which is a form of hip replacement) 10 months after my RNY. I had transitioned to maintenance about 1-1.5 months prior to my surgery. I had also hoped the weight loss would help my hip, but alas it did not. Strangely, I also need both of my knees replaced, but the weight loss did relieve a lot of the pain I was experiencing in my knees.

The surgery and subsequent recovery will be MUCH easier now that you have lost weight. I also had no long term issues with the surgery and my weight. Of course, you will come home quite a bit heavier than you went in, but that is just due to the fluids they are pumping in you, and the swelling. I literally gained like 16lbs! It was shocking to see on the scale, but I knew it would come back off. I had a lot of swelling and it took close to a months for the swelling to go down and my weight to go back to normal, but in the end, I gained no weight with the surgery and it did not negatively impact me in any way. In fact it was awesome, because I am now pain free in my hip!

Thanks for the response.

So glad all went well for you! Thanks for the warning about fluid weight gain due to the surgery. I had the same from the actual RNY surgery.

I had my arthscopic MRI yesterday, so I should get results in the next week or so. Worst case scenario for me is hip replacement, but most likely they will need to just clean the joint up due to laberal tearing. Then I'll need to decide when will be the best time for that procedure to happen - do I want to get it done before or after the heavy winters we generally have here.

I'm looking forward to being pain free!!

I did mine in January specifically due to the winters. I live in Michigan, and the weather is so bad that time of the year that I'm not leaving the house unless I have to anyway!! Didn't want to screw up activities in the Spring/Summer/Winter.

If it makes you feel any better, the whole process was a piece of cake given how significant of a surgery it is. There was not a ton of pain (really more of an extreme soreness as opposed to "pain"). The recovery was very quick for me - a couple of weeks with a walker, a couple of weeks with a cane, and back to 100% within 6-8 weeks. And the extreme pain I was experiencing from the arthritic hip was gone the minute I rolled out of surgery. I would do it again in a heartbeat!