I’ve got bilateral hip dysplasia. I’ve written some about it here, and I’m very open about it with my clients. In early 2019, I decided to get pelvic x-rays taken for the first time since about 2004 for tracking purposes. Today I remembered to get a copy of the images for myself, and want to share a little about what they show and mean.
Here is my 2019 x-ray, looking at the front of my pelvis and very strange hip joints. For those who don’t know what an average female pelvis x-ray looks like, or just want a reminder for comparison, here’s an example.
Having hip dysplasia means I have shallow hip sockets. Make a fist with one hand and cover it entirely with your other palm and fingers - that’s a normal hip socket shape. Now pull your hand back so only your fingers cover your fist - that’s a dysplasic hip socket shape.
There are all kinds of things you can see in this x-ray about my surgical and developmental history. For starters, you can see how shallow both sockets are, and you can see how deeply different my right side is from my left. You can see how much smaller the right femur and femoral head (leg bone and where it meets the socket) are from barely being used while on crutches and avoiding that leg while I was still growing in middle school and high school.
Notice the odd shape of the right wing of my pelvis? An x-ray technician who didn’t know my history read that as an underdeveloped illiac crest, but they were wrong. It’s actually where a surgeon cut part of the crest off to make a bone graft and extend my then extremely shallow right hip socket. See the weird little lip on the outside edge of the hip socket and the gap above it? That’s where the surgeon attached the bone graft, and then where my body decided it did not want extra bone and then reabsorbed said graft.
In this same section of the x-ray, look down and to the right from my hip socket. You’ll see another shallow divet - that is my original hip socket. It was so shallow that in elementary school, my femur migrated up and to the left to where it is now. With some help from that surgeon and despite a LOT of complications, it made a new socket for itself there, and it’s functional.
The point of all this is that bodies are AMAZINGLY resilient. That cliche phrase, “Life will find a way”, kind of drives me nuts, but it’s also true. My body needed to keep me upright and able to walk if at all possible, and it did and learned how to stabilize on this totally weird right hip joint. Not only can I walk, but I can dance and hike and have very little limitations or pain.
If you’re dealing with your own complications, please take this story as a little boost of your faith in your own body’s deep capacity to heal and function as well as it possibly can under very weird conditions. It’s trying really hard.