My hip pain started around 2015, when I was in my mid-30s. It began as stiffness, then a pinch or tweak. My wife Barbara and I live on an acreage in Sturgeon County, Alberta, with our three kids, where we raise a handful of cows and some chickens. So our lives are very active, and I’m also a park maintenance supervisor at a nearby provincial park. That’s a physical job too, maintaining buildings, outhouses and campsites.
Soon, even walking became hard—there were times when I couldn’t get out of bed without terrible pain. Getting in and out of the tractor I use for park maintenance and on the farm became impossible on some days. I pushed myself as hard as I could every week, and then ended up on the couch every weekend, trying to recover enough to do it all again. In just a few months, I had gone from being an active, athletic, outdoorsy person to being dependent on others for basic tasks.
So my wife and I researched our options. We considered paying for private surgery in Canada, which would cost about $30,000 per hip. But I’d have to leave the province, because regulations mean that a private clinic in Alberta can’t charge an Albertan for a procedure like mine. So I’d have to go to Ontario or B.C. That meant I wouldn’t have any outpatient support, like physiotherapy, unless I paid for it as well, in addition to flights and accommodations.
Of course, I was anxious. They were going to cut into my butt muscles and part them “like curtains” to access my hip, remove the old hip joint, grind out the socket of my pelvis, then drive the artificial hip joint into my femur. I’d be under general anaesthetic, and afterwards I’d stay in the clinic for two nights, sharing a room with another patient. Then I’d move into an apartment building with a nurse on call, costing $100 a night.
In the spring of 2023, I decided to return to do the same surgery on my left hip, which was getting worse. We turned it into a family vacation, and spent two weeks touring Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then I went in for my surgery in July.