Turning Pain into Beauty
I thought I was being a lazy pain wuss last Spring when the pandemic shut everything down. No longer able to go to my studio to work, I sat on my couch for months afraid of the pain I felt when I got up. Every once in a while I faced the fear of pain and getting covid and went outside to go for a very slow walk. I knew I had to move my body, so I motivated myself by making each walk a quest to photograph the most beautiful details I could find in nature. I thought it would be the spring flowers, but instead it ended up being the resilient weeds.
I spent hours and hours on the couch drawing on top of the photographs I took on my walks. That was something I could do, and doing it helped me let go of what I couldn’t do. Even though my experience with nature was mostly via the Procreate app on my ipad, focusing so intently on each and every detail gave me the therapeutic effects that I experienced when I was actually out in nature. My task to trace every crevice, crease, and leaf kept me in the here and now and helped me feel productive. Towards what exactly was unknown to me at the time, but I knew I had to keep at it.
Expanse in Lush Green
I didn’t know it at the time, but the pain I was experiencing in my pregnant body during this time was from Hip Dysplasia.
Here is the story about how I was diagnosed and what can be done to fix it:
After the double whammy of a divorce and the death of my father in 2018 I started kickboxing to start exercising again and to feel good about myself. Shortly after that I started going on long walks and after about 20 minutes I would start to feel a slight pain in my hip. I didn’t think much of it. I’ve had shoulder pain before and it’s gone away over time, so I figured this would too. When I got pregnant in January of 2020 the pain slowly faded (I later found out this was because of pregnancy hormones) until the middle of my second trimester. This time the pain was in my pubic bone. It ended up getting so bad that I was crawling up the stairs. It was so painful. After I had my baby girl I figured the pain would get better. It took awhile for the pubic pain to decrease, but as it did my hip pain came back and got even worse. I could hardly walk 2 blocks and I began limping. I finally went to get x-rays fully expecting to just be sent to PT, but that is not what happened.
Rooted in Lush Green
I had to go to a sports medicine doctor to discuss the results and get an exam. When the assistant came in she asked me if I was born breech, I replied that I was born Frank breech, which is butt first in case you were wondering. I thought the question was very weird. Then she showed me the x-ray and told me that I was born with bilateral hip dysplasia that has gone undiagnosed until now. My right hip is much worse than my left, which is the leg I kicked with the most in kickboxing. The kicker (hehe) is that after talking to the doctor and doing what you could only imagine was a ton of research, I found out that the only way to fix this is with a surgery called a PAO (periacetabular osteotomy). Basically, they have to saw 3 bones in my hip and pelvis to separate my hip socket from the rest of my hip, rotate it, and screw everything back together. The recovery will include regrowing bone, getting around in a wheelchair and then a walker and crutches, and by 6 months if all goes well, (and it will!) I will be able to walk unassisted again. I’ll need to go to physical therapy 2x a week starting at 2 months to help me regain my range of motion and regain strength in my atrophied muscles, and to correct my limp. The good news is that I found a highly sought after surgeon to get the job done right!
Expanse in Beautiful Black
To find my surgeon, Dr. Kim at Boston Children’s Hospital, I joined a PAO (that’s the name of the surgery) group on facebook and spoke to many many people who have also gone through this. I showed my x-ray and MRI studies to 3 surgeons who specialize in hip preservation to get their opinions. Everybody said the same thing, that I have severe hip dysplasia in my right hip, that luckily my cartilage is still in good shape, and that I have a good prognosis! I also asked them lots of questions to see who I felt most confident in. One thing that sold me on Dr. Kim besides everybodies overwhelming praises of him was that he had a technique to get to the hip without cutting or detaching leg muscle. When he told me that, I realized how important it was that I ‘shopped around’, especially for something that would have such a huge impact on my life. You see, when I saw the sports medicine doctor he warned me that if this surgery is not done very well, it could disable me for the rest of my life or until I was able to get a total hip replacement in my 40’s. This realization made me push past the doctor on the 1st tier of my insurance and go for Dr. Kim, which I am so grateful is at least a tier 3 doctor in terms of cost.
So here I am a week out from surgery launching my collection after going back and forth about it for weeks not knowing if it was a good idea since I have so many other things to do to get ready…like pumping and shipping breast milk before it is tainted by pain meds for my baby. Ultimately, I pushed myself to put this work out into the world because it will make me feel confident in myself as a working artist, which will help me get up and at em’ after surgery, but also because I am so inspired by all the other artists putting their work out there and making a living off of it, and because honestly, nothing gives me more of a kick in the pants to overcome my fear of failure more than a really big bill! So if you love what you have seen and you want to help a mother out, please treat yourself to a beautiful piece of art and share this with your community!
Here is something silly just for fun from when I was pregnant with baby girl!