FAI (hip impingement) Diagnosis

For a while now I've been having pain in my hip, sometimes my groin, lower back on the same side while running. So I toned down my training to see if it would get better. It didn't, it got worse, so eventually I stopped training altogether for two weeks. After the two weeks, I tried walking only, but there was still pain.

I then went to my doc, who manipulated my hip some, poked and prodded the area while I was 'ow-ing' and 'ouch-ing' and said it seemed to be bursitis and a course of anti-inflammatories should clear it up. I limped home (all the poking and proding made it worse of course *sigh*) and started the anti-inflammatories, so that was another week of rest. At the end of the course, the pain was still there, so it was back to the doc.  He said a cortisone injection into my hip would probably be the next step, but needed to be done by an ortho. He also mentioned the possibility of X-rays and a soft tissue scan. He then sent me to an orthopaedic surgeon for investigation.

Now that I've started running and seeing the benefits in fitness and weight loss, any curtailing of that annoys me immensely :( I wanted to get back to running ASAP, so I was hoping for just the cortisone and no further tests - yeah I wish......

I went to my ortho appointment and he also prodded and poked and manipulated (and I ended up limping more again *sigh*) then said he wanted me to go for X-rays. Soooooooo, off to the radiologists I went, duly got X-rayed and limped back up to the orthos rooms to show him the pics. He took the pics out of the envelope and I was expecting the usual "There doesn't seem to be any problem there" that I have got every other time I've been for X-rays for anything, but instead he studied, looked, ran his finger over the pic in certain areas, looked some more, brought them up on his laptop, made them larger, looked some more.....By now I was getting kinda worried, I mean if nothing was wrong, he didn't need to look so closely - right??

He then put the pics down and looked at me and said "You have some impingement". I must have looked a bit blank, so he proceeded to explain and show me what he meant on the pics. A good explanation (better than I can give) is here: http://www.sportsortho.co.uk/article.asp?article=67

It didn't sound too bad I thought (at this point thats what I thought), but I asked some questions and he gave me some answers. There was also bursitis, so I duly got the cortisone injection into my hip, which wasn't nearly as painful as the ones I had in each shoulder late last year by the same ortho. He said I must have some physio and come back and see him in a month and we would take it from there. I then asked him the million rand question "What is the worst case scenario?" The worst case scenario it seems will be some kind of scope into my hip to see if there is any pathology. I limped out of his rooms feeling vaguely happy that I now knew what the problem was and it was being treated - little did I know.....

This morning I started doing some research on hip impingement, which I discovered is FAI ( the full name is in the article above) and boy did I start getting worried!!!! Then I discovered this blog http://www.understandingfai.com/2008/07/my-story.html and learned a whole lot more, straight from the horses mouth and I'm really thankful to Vanessa's blog because it gave me the best info possible, from the patients point of view. Some of it also scared the hell out of me, especially the painful MRI procedure (although she says the second was better than the first). I'm still in the early stages of my treatment though, so it remains to be seen how far I will need to go and I'm really thankful to my doc and the ortho that it was diagnosed quite early it seems so I may not have too much damage.

I'll let you know how things unfold further down the line :)

PS: One last thing, the ortho initially said 4 weeks rest and I moaned and groaned and mentioned my Two Oceans Half Marathon entry, so he relented and said 1 week rest and then very light training for a while thereafter :)

Camping in the Cederberg

This weekend we were lucky enough to go camping at Jamaka in the Cederberg :) Camping is something we do fairly often in the summer and normally I/we start preparing about a week in advance, checking all the crates of camping stuff, making sure everything is clean and everything is there and restocking what needs to be replaced. Food shopping is normally done about 2 days before the time, except for the stuff that needs to be bought at the last minute.

This time however, we only knew for certain on Wednesday that Trevor (and the other people going as well) had leave, so shopping, packing and everything else had to be done on Thursday evening as we were leaving early Friday morning. It was a big hectic, but all got done - if a bit haphazzardly LOL

*sings* It was a long and winding road......LOL well not really, but it was long and hot and I was grateful for our cars aircon.

There were two stop/go areas along the way in both there and back we had good luck, mostly just driving on through, but at the most we had to wait about a minute and a half :) When we arrived I was pleased to see that there weren't many people there, which I prefer as this is a LARGE campsite and the ablution fascilities, although nice enough, aren't really enough to cope with a full campsite. Setting up camp went well with a bit of 'sun tracking' to decide where the best place to pitch the tents would be to keep them as much in the shade as possible.

As you can see, Trevor was taking a well deserved rest in the hammock after doing most of the setting up. I did help though LOL. On the whole, the weather was nice if a bit too hot at times. The main problems were the strong gusts of wind (it was quite windy the whole weekend) and most of all, the midges, which were REALLY annoying *sigh* Luckily the swimming pool in the river is lovely so we spent a lot of time cooling down in it.

The campsite is lovely, with LOTS of trees, but you do need to pick your site carefully if you're there in the hot weather. Some of the sites are in shade all day, but others may have morning or afternoon sun or partial shade only. The website for the camp has a map of the (old) campground and if you click on the number of the site, you can see a pic of the site  http://nieuwoudt-farm.com/Welcome/index.html The mountains and vegetation is beautiful and this was the view from out tent in the morning...

On Saturday morning, Trevor and I decided to take a walk to look at the 'new' campsite and look for the horses that are there, because I wanted to take some pics of them. This is apparently where I got sunburned without realizing it :( because I didn't put on sunblock :( When we got near the new campsite and were crossing the logs across the drift with Trevor going first, I saw 'somebody' running to meet him LOL

He was a real cutiepie and followed us everywhere like a dog.

 I called him Bokmakierie but I have no idea if he has an actual name.

 Every now and then he would butt behind Trevor's legs, not with any malice, just a kind of pushing :) He even followed Trevor into the ablution block LOL. He followed us when we started back to our own campsite but when we got to the gate, we had to leave him behind, he wasn't impressed.....

Later in the day, the 'herder' drove the whole herd of goats and sheep through the campsite.

The rest of the weekend went by great with lots of swimming in the lovely cool water (luckily not too cold or I probably never would have got in).The temperature was 44 on the last day. This is the second time we have been to Jamaka and we'll definately go again because thank goodness its not tooooooo far along the gravel road and we found a better gravel road to travel on to get there, through Clanwilliam - much easier on our car.