HIP IMAGES

I finally got around to extracting some of the images from my x-ray and MRI. The first one is an x-ray of my hip. The femoral head (“ball”) should be pretty round, but if you look closely on my right hip (which is the left side of the picture) you can see that it is not so round (see red circle). The same thing, although less prominent, can be seen on the other hip. I have a tear of my left labrum as well, however it is likely much less severe. Both hips were “popping,” which is why I went to the doctor in the first place, but only the right hip had discomfort associated with it.

This image is just one “slice” of my MRI. Since Lauren is a Radiologist, I definitely needed her help to decipher the MRI slices. She pointed out a bunch of things in the slices to me, but they would be very hard to describe via a blog post, so I am just going to stick to the obvious one. The red circle in this image is a cyst on my femoral head. eMedicine.com defines it as “a common, benign, fluid-containing lesion, usually occurring in the metaphysis of long bones.”  There's apparently about a million different kinds of cysts, but the sample images of a "common bone cyst" looked pretty close to what mine looks like.

There are other parts of the MRI where you can see the tear (if you have a trained Radiologist pointing them out to you) and also where the fluid that was injected into my hip was "leaking" into the neighboring tissue.

Btw, I mentioned in a previous post that this surgery is the same operation that A-rod had this past offseason.  Well his rehab must have gone pretty well because he had another solid year.  In fact, his first swing of the season was a 3-run HR and his last swing of the season was a grand slam!  Even more impressive was the fact that going into the 7th inning of the last regular season game, A-rod was 2 HR's shy of 30 and 7 RBI's shy of 100 (he had a streak going of consecutive seasons with 30+ HR and 100+ RBI).  In the 7th inning, A-rod hit 2 HR's and knocked in 7 runs (a 3-run HR and a grand slam).  Wow.