5 Lessons My Hip Replacement Taught Me About Life

According to the American College of Rheumatology, over 450,000 people get hip replacements annually. I became one of those people in May after a four-year journey, extended in part by the COVID pandemic and having not one but two surgeons retire in the middle of my quest.

On some levels, I was perfectly fine waiting. Despite the pain and how my right hip limited my activities, I was reluctant to undergo the knife for one other big reason: I had never had major surgery.

Yes, I'd been to the hospital once in college after a car accident to repair a broken knuckle, and I'd been to the hospital to have three children. Still, I'd never replaced or repaired anything substantive. I was understandably nervous. Now, seven months out, I wish I'd done it sooner, like many other replacement folks. I can run up the stairs! I can play pickleball! I can sleep without pain!

But the reasons I also wish I'd jumped in sooner have nothing to do with my new hip. The real upside of my hip replacement is the life lessons I had no idea I needed to learn, lessons that will stand me in good stead as I enter the next chapter, and, frankly, discoveries that could have helped when I was younger as well.

Getting a new hip, it turns out, was a step toward living my best life emotionally and physically. Here are a few of the life lessons I learned:

Once I flipped the switch on getting a new hip, my anxiety level about the impending surgery went through the roof. I worried about the pain. I worried about my recovery — would I be one of the success stories, or would the procedure leave me less than whole? 

I worried about getting around. And then, one day, I had an epiphany that dramatically helped to reduce my anxiety. I realized that my fear of being dependent was the crux of these worries.

Thanks to various life experiences and my personality, I've been adamant — stubbornly? — independent my whole life. Something broken? I'll fix it myself. I'm usually ready to offer five solutions when people share their challenges. I was always the person in the group who preferred to lead (and try to ensure success) rather than be a mere crowd member. It's a trait that, for the most part, has stood me in good stead.

The problem is that a lifetime of thinking of myself as a fixer has meant a slow erosion into the belief — sometimes overt, sometimes unconscious — that asking for help is a weakness, not a strength, that being dependent is somehow associated with being less than. I'm not alone in this belief. 

Stanford social psychologist Xuan Zhao has studied this phenomenon as part of her research. Among her discoveries? While many of us assume asking for help is an inconvenience to others, in reality, people want to help; they're just unsure how to do it. She reports that our concerns about being rejected or burdening others are fictitious for the most part.

Sharing my ah-ha moment with my husband, Peter, proved that point. "We can work on that," he said before reassuring me that he was here and happy to do whatever was necessary during my recovery. It's a realization that I'm trying to incorporate into my life going forward. Apparently, I don't have to do it all myself to have it all.

A return to everyday life takes a while. Yes, some people seem (annoyingly) to recover minutes after the surgery — don't even get me started about my YMCA fitness instructor, who was back teaching dance class after four weeks! — but the reality is that recovery is as variable as humans themselves. 

My hip may have been replaced in 50 minutes, but getting to the point of surgery was a four-year process. That's a lot of muscle loss and compensating the wrong way with how I walked and did just about everything.

Getting back to some sense of normalcy takes time, and, as someone who wakes up every day with a to-do list, I had to learn to sit back and celebrate little victories, which, eventually, do add up. After months of walking up the stairs one step at a time, hand carefully on the banister, I realized one day at the top of the stairs that I had just blithely walked up quickly without even thinking or holding the handrail. Yes, I have made progress!

It's a lesson I'm trying to remember in my daily life now, especially as — let's be honest — certain activities will likely continue to get more challenging as we age. Some may need to be altered permanently because our bodies shift and change. Remembering that life is a long game reminds me that sometimes sitting back and letting the pace be what it is meant to be is the best strategy.

Being less mobile and physically adept than I was most of my life was a bit of a shock. (See number one about independence issues.) Using a walker made me feel as if I had aged 20 years while under the knife. And don't even get me started about the raised toilet seat!

It was perhaps the third day after surgery when a moment of belly laughs helped me realize I needed to let go and take it all less seriously. The outpatient surgical center would send me physical therapy videos daily. 

A few days post-surgery, one of the videos asked me to move my right leg, the one with the new hip, up and down five times. I looked at my leg, and while my brain sent the message to move, nothing happened. Peter said, "Go ahead. It's okay to move it," I just burst out laughing. "You don't understand. I'm telling it to move, and absolutely nothing is happening!" 

Maybe it was the oxycontin, but the absurdity of the request to move my leg 72 hours after a new joint just hit me, and I laughed for the next five minutes. That laugh changed how I looked at my recovery. It helped me relax and let go a bit. Medical science suggests it perhaps helped me in other ways, too. 

The Mayo Clinic reports that laughter can help reduce pain as the body produces painkillers, reduces stress and improves your immune system. The bottom line is that it reminded me to lighten up generally, a lesson I'm trying to incorporate into my daily life. Sometimes, it turns out, laughter is the best medicine.

It's easy to bemoan the losses as we age rather than celebrate what works. I used to be able to run five miles, knit for hours without wrist pain, and jump from log to log without thinking if my balance was good enough — the list is long and different for each of us. We have all lived lifetimes of not thinking before doing because the underlying presumption was we'd always be able to do "it."

The reality of how much we all change hit me full force this summer when Peter and I watched our 13-year-old granddaughter plop down on the curb while we were on a historical walking tour in Salem, Massachusetts, and then when she was ready to walk again, she just stood straight up — no hands! I'm unsure how your body works, but I no longer get down on the floor without a clear exit strategy involving something to grab or ensuring no one is watching.

Before I replaced my hip, I was very much in a woe-is-me funk about how my body was failing me. Over time, however, as I began regaining my strength and slowly began to do more of the activities I had done earlier, I realized that I needed to celebrate what is, not what was. Yes, it may be different, but it's still working. 

I remind myself that the body I have today is the one I wish I had in 10 years, so I should stop being so hard on myself. The time to celebrate what's working is now.

In my early 40s, I became the editor of the alternative newspaper, where I had worked for several years. I was excited about the opportunity but also nervous. My husband gave me a card on my first day that I pinned to the bulletin board near my desk, which I have always carried in my heart.

The cover featured a cyclist hovering in the gap between two pieces of land, the chasm below obviously not a place you want to land. Inside, the message read, "Leap! It's never as far as you think!"

As we age, the likelihood that medical issues will crop up becomes not a question of if but of when. Facing and accepting this reality is part of the aging process. Sometimes, just saying yes and moving forward is the best and only way to go.