Hip Replacements

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

“They’re good!” I say to my friend Sam, leaning over the table because we are old, and hearing each other over the band playing less than a foot away from us is impossible.

She laughs. “Everyone has that reaction.”

I was skeptical. I admit it.  My expectations were low coming into this evening. First, I had no idea that my old friend and Sam’s husband Neil even knew how to play the bass and was in a band until last year. Second, when Neil told me the band’s name, The Hip Replacements, I couldn’t take them seriously. I mean, come on! How good could these guys be?

Ha! They showed me.

Here I was, on a beautiful Friday night at Mike’s on the Water in St. Clair Shores, MI, singing and swaying along with all the other patrons who are +/- 10 years from needing a hip replacement to Brown Eyed Girl and Wish You Were Here having a great time. Their set was filled with songs I can sing by heart, which is baffling because sometimes remembering what I walked into a room for is a challenge. Yet, they fire up Rambling Man, and my brain doesn’t miss a beat. I sunk right into the music and let it take me where it would.

I have known Neil and Sam for decades. They are the type of people who, even after not being in touch for a long time, I can call up and say, “Hey, I’m in the area. Want to get together?” and it’s perfectly normal. Time messes with me when I am with old friends like this after a long hiatus—it is as if none has passed, yet our gray hair and our grown children let me know that is not true. It made sense when Neil called me and said, “Hey, we are going to be in St. Clair Shores for a two-night gig,” that I planned my travel schedule accordingly. As Sam said, I needed “something to anchor me.”

I’m not sure she knows the magnitude of that truth.

When I was working in the clinic as a Physical Therapist, my specialty was vestibular rehabilitation. That is a clinical way of saying I treated people who were suffering from dizziness and imbalance. What I loved about treating this patient population was that if I did my job correctly, and the patient did their part, they got better. I saw people transform over the weeks that I worked with them from not being able to enjoy their lives to returning to who they were before the incident that made them dizzy in the first place. It was magical to watch.

The therapeutic principle that I employed was habituation—giving the brain enough stimulus to bring on symptoms and discomfort paired with enough rest and downtime so that the brain can eventually discount dizziness because it no longer feels threatened. By the time people saw me, their dizziness was an error signal. It was not an indication of an imminent threat, yet their brain didn’t know that. To keep them safe, the brain made them dizzy so they wouldn’t do anything that seemed scary, like walking or turning their head. When they did, they felt like crap, and it reinforced that movement and activity = bad. They were trapped, and it sucked.

It was my job to help them break that cycle and let their brains know that turning the head or walking was okay and that a Danger Will Robinson signal was no longer needed. For many patients, it meant ramping up their activity in a controlled way, almost like dosing, using motion as medicine, until their brains got used to their new normal. They had to start slowly; I had to gain their trust. Patients could slowly return to doing the things they wanted and needed to do. Eventually, they returned to themselves.

When Sam said that I needed something to anchor myself, I realized that I had been habituating myself into my new life since January. I experienced a shock to my system and life that left me unbalanced and dizzy and ungrounded. Making anything but the slightest move felt terrifying, nauseating, Herculean, and exhausting. Sitting still seemed like the safest thing to do. I believe it was for those first months, a necessary step in healing. I wonder if circumstances hadn’t pushed me forward, would I have stayed in the familiarity and comfort of staying still?

Yes, I think I would have.

I, like my patients, am in the process of returning to myself. I am safe, yet my brain doesn’t fully realize it yet. I still have moments of panic and Danger Will Robinson hysteria, yet they are shorter and farther apart. Sometimes I crave different versions of my old life so desperately, like sitting around the dining room table with my kids in my old house in Knoxville or curled up on the couch in my former home in Gaylord that it physically hurts. I fear I will never feel normal or fully myself again, but I feel this way less and less. Those moments pass more quickly.

As the fears retreat, moments of joy and happiness and connection replace them, and I get glimpses of my old and future selves merging into the next iteration of me. I am emerging, just as my patients did, visit after visit, as they pushed themselves a little further and rested when they needed to.

I need rest like my patients did so my brain knows it’s safe. I need to feel grounded so that I can go further afield and try new things and experience new places and talk to people at yoga class or on the street and then go to their drumming class because it seems like a good idea, and it is. I need to remind my nervous system that I am safe even when nothing is familiar, and I am failing at a belly dancing/finger cymbal class outside in a park. (Yes, that happened.) I need to know I can return to familiar touchstones like my brother’s house in Detroit or a concert with songs embedded deep in my brain so that I am less anxious that I have no idea where I will establish my next home or what job will support me, or where I will be six months. Resting in the familiar allows me to move forward into the unknown.

I need anchors like Neil and Sam and all the other old friends and family I have spent time with since January, in familiar and unfamiliar places. I am grateful beyond words to all of you. You are helping me return to me, hopefully before I need a real hip replacement.