Word: hipped
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Well, here was one significant counterclaim lying on the stretcher today. Nick's shortened, turned-in leg announced the problem even before I saw his x-ray. His new old hip was dislocated...
...interested in seeing this patient because I'd never done one of the new hips. My teacher had done them in the old days, thousands of them, but he abandoned them immediately and completely when the first metal-on-plastic hips came out. "It would be foolish to go back" is what he'd said 20 years ago when I asked him about the old designs - I took his word for it and, so far, have never regretted it. I also knew from my own experience, having done more than 1,000 hip surgeries by that point, that the metal...
Nick was about as nice as an old man with a dislocated hip can be. Despite what is typically an extremely painful problem, he was pleasant, talkative and charming. His interests lay in the history of his native Sparta and in the making, extolling and drinking of large amounts of the well-known (and in my limited experience, best-avoided) pine-resin-laced traditional Greek wine retsina. Trained by decades of exposure to the resinous brew, Nick's brain and liver now presented us with an unusual difficulty: they had become so good at detoxifying his system that...
Putting a dislocated hip back in place, or "reducing the hip" in our jargon, requires a sedated patient. It is unquestionably the most athletically challenging of all medical procedures. Two people hold the patient down, the orthopedist climbs up on the stretcher, bends the knee, picks up the thigh and then uses a combination of delicate manipulation and great brute force to pop the hip back. My back always hurts for a week after I do one. Spasms of the huge muscles around the patient's hip must be controlled with intravenous sedation - or else the entire procedure...
...Leonidas. Sedating old people is a dangerous business - they can stop breathing in an instant - so by the time we had given him enough narcotic to drop a horse and he wasn't even sleepy, we knew we couldn't give him any more. We had to reduce the hip with Nick fully awake...