The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone …

Now that’s a strange title for a post you might say. It’s a line from an old folksong. What does that have to do with anything. Well, recently I had an opportunity to learn a bunch of new italian words through direct experience. You see I was walking along, ironically enough going to the gym, when I tripped (mi sono inciampato) and fell down(sono caduto a terra). When I got up (mi sono alzato) I found that I couldn’t put any weight on my right leg. Thinking that I must have bruised or pulled a muscle dramatically I accepted a kind offer of a bystander to give me a ride to my car. I drove home very carefully since I had to use my left hand to lift my right leg to move from the accelerator to the brake pedal. I asked a friend to drive me to a physical therapy appointment (I had a simple shoulder operation last fall). The therapist examined me briefly and sent me immediately in a wheelchair to the emergency room for an x-ray (radiografia). Sure enough I had broken my hip (anca). After waiting the appropriate amount of time since my last meal I was wheeled into the operating room where they put 3 screws (tre viti) in the hip bone. I’m just screwed together. After a single night stay in the hospital I went home and of course there were additional words to learn. Il deambulatore (the walker), le stampelle (the crutches) and il bastone (the cane) are all words that are now firmly in my vocabulary. So now it has been about 7 weeks so I am walking unassisted but still a little awkwardly as the muscles in the area gradually get back to their original undisturbed status. At the final follow-up visit with the surgeon (chirurgo) I asked for copies of x-rays.

Of course at first I was a little embarrassed to say that I’d broken a hip. Geezer break! But not really. The surgeon said that the bone density is fine but just sometime shit happens. Another doctor related a story of an acquaintance in his 20s who fell over from a stop on his bicycle and broke is hip so one can just fall wrong regardless of the age of one’s bones.

BTW if anyone out there has corrections to my italian, please correct me. I always want to improve.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2013 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.