Hip Resuracing by "Katharine Greider"

"The Hip Is So Much Better, I Forget About It" By Katharine Greider

For Douglas and Ann Stoda of Tomah, Wis., Paris was the low point.

They weren't on vacation in the City of Light, but trudging through chaotic Charles de Gaulle International Airport on their way to Chennai, India, where Doug was to undergo surgery to repair a hip first injured 13 years earlier in a logging accident. The trip—including the couple's first-ever commercial flight—took well over 20 hours, and Doug was in no shape for it.

Before his hip resurfacing last year, Doug, now 53, had been in so much pain that he couldn't sleep for longer than 90 minutes at a stretch. Aware that his desperation for relief might blur his thinking, he asked Ann to keep her eyes open as they traveled into unfamiliar territory. "I said, 'Ann, if something comes up that is not right, we stop. You use your best judgment here.' " Ann says she cried on the way from the airport to the hospital, overwhelmed by contrasting scenes of opulence and poverty in Chennai (formerly known as Madras), a city nearly the size of New York.

But once they arrived at Apollo Specialty Hospital, they found themselves in the hands of a kindly surgeon named Vijay C. Bose, who visited them daily and put them at ease with quips about Wisconsin cheese. Then Doug recuperated for 11 days at a resort on the glittering Coromandel Coast of the Indian Ocean, with hospital-trained personnel checking in regularly.

Back home, Doug soon found he could work on the industrial line at a local glass factory for 10-hour shifts. This was good news because the Stodas, who were uninsured, faced an $11,500 bill for the surgery and travel—a fraction of the U.S. cost, but still a lot of money.

Today the Stodas are providing the glass company with cleaning services, this time as contractors running their own business. The surgery bill is paid off.

And the hip? "I can jog," says Doug. "I can jump rope. The hip is so much better that I forget about it."

www.hipresurfacingindia.com

Reference:

http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/yourhealth the_hip_is_so_much_better_i_forget_about_it.html