Each and every day, your hip pain gets worse. Mine did.

“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

Somehow you adjust to it. You learn how to manage pain, mostly by ignoring it.

Your mind accepts the pain, deals with it and you move on, even though your hip is spiraling out of control.

Then the next month, week or day, the pain gets worse, your mind accepts the pain, deals with it and you move on.

You essentially build up a ‘pain callous’ to deal with your ever worsening hip.

I became very good at having pain, mentally managing it, have more pain, then managing that new level. I became so good at pain management that, in retrospect, it had a very detrimental effect on me. I was driving my car and I had learned to minimize my hip pain by simply using my right hand to lift my right thigh when I needed to move my foot from the gas to the brake pedal.  In retrospect, that was, well, umm, err, extremely stupid of me.

In short, I thought I had won the ‘Battle of Ego’ where my mind could control, or at least accept and manage, my hip pain. I thought it was a good battle to win. It wasn’t.

I thought of myself as the quarterback character in the Keanu Reeves movie, The Replacements

“Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory… lasts forever.”

Recognize what pain really is – it is your body’s way of telling you that there is a problem.

#PainManagement #HipReplacement #HipReplacementSurgery #ManagePain