sqeaking and altitude, thoughts please

[pblythswood]

Hi all, it's been a while since I posted, so would appreciate any thoughts. comments.

I'm 56 years old, two and a half years post op and very active, and train 6 hours a week, trying to keep father time at bay or as best I can !!

Last week was on a trek to Everest base camp and after we got to our first stop my hip started squeaking badly but only on an uphill gradient, and was slow to respond to any request to move..don't think it was dehydration related as I'd been drinking all day and had drunk in excess of 5 litres of water..as I couldn't continue I got helicoptered down and miraculously as soon as I came to a lower altitude, squeaking stopped, I've now come home and hip is back to normal and seemingly with no adverse effects.

Appreciate any thoughts, comments.
Regards
Paul

[evant]

Good on you for pushing the limits on your hip resurfacing.

This sounds like there should be a logical explanation relating altitude, temperature, pressure, contraction, expansion, on fluids and gas etc but it'll need someone more intelligent than I to give you the answer.

Let's hope there is an answer and a way around this so you can return to Everest.

[hernanu]

Hi all, it's been a while since I posted, so would appreciate any thoughts. comments.

I'm 56 years old, two and a half years post op and very active, and train 6 hours a week, trying to keep father time at bay or as best I can !!

Last week was on a trek to Everest base camp and after we got to our first stop my hip started squeaking badly but only on an uphill gradient, and was slow to respond to any request to move..don't think it was dehydration related as I'd been drinking all day and had drunk in excess of 5 litres of water..as I couldn't continue I got helicoptered down and miraculously as soon as I came to a lower altitude, squeaking stopped, I've now come home and hip is back to normal and seemingly with no adverse effects.

Appreciate any thoughts, comments.
Regards
Paul

Hey Paul,

Dehydration is much more pronounced at high altitudes. Several things contribute to this:

• At 6000 feet above sea level, you exhale and perspire twice as much moisture as you do at sea level.
• Higher altitude means lower air pressure. This results in more rapid evaporation of moisture from skin surface, and from your lungs.
• Most high altitude areas are also very low in humidity, which means evaporation is further accelerated.
• the higher up you are, the more water you need to keep your body functioning.
  

As well as the extra effort that you're making, which would cause more perspiration and breathing, causing evaporation by skin and lungs.

One thing emphasized by my martial arts teachers is that by the time you feel thirsty, you're already dehydrated. So we loaded up on fluids well before any exertion, and as we went.

The amount of water needed by an average human at sea level is roughly 3 liters, so if you assume double that at altitude, resting. That means that you would probably need more than five liters as you exerted yourself.

Sounds like you hit on much more dehydration than normal due to the elevation, the dryness of the environment and your (understandable) exertion.

Reference:

http://www.highaltitudelife.com/dehydration.htm

[Dan L]

Paul;

It seems as well as dehydration, a number of hippys here with BHR's (Babybarista, Woodstock Hippy, James Laveglia [see his hip story under Dr Brooks]) as well as myself have reported that colder temps seem to also be (anecdotally) correlated to squeaking.  Mine was after doing a lot of work outside in colder temps last spring, Woody just reported squeaking after being outside working all day this spring, Barista after walking along a cold beach out in the pacific NW, and James Laveglia after mushroom hunting in Michigan in colder temps... (search squeak or squeakapalooza here).

In none of these reports here did anyone report adverse impact, just the noise.  I wonder about synovial fluid viscosity in colder temps and with the added dimension of dehydration as the cause.

For me it was hilarious, but I was not able to get my wife to witness until the second time it happened last spring, to share the mirth.

Best regards,


Dan

[tedroberts]

I've been up to 13,000 feet and not had any squeaking.  I've also been outside for extended periods of time at 0 to minus 15 F with no squeak.  I like the dehydration theory.

[mountaingoat]

I live at roughly 6000ft ( on a ridge above Boulder,CO). I routinely ski, hike and ride my bike at elevations up to 10,000 around Colorado and have never had any squeaking. I was just at 12,000ft last weekend skiing at Arapahoe Basin and I think that's the highest I've been with my resurfaced hips since my surgery. No squeaking and I was definitely using my hips a lot.

But I will say the one time I felt a strange sensation in my hip as if something was not lubricating right was after a long day of skinning (uphill walking on skis) in the backcountry. It made me wonder if it was the cold or whether I was just dehydrated. Its really easy to get dehydrated at altitude...happens to me all the time.

Pretty cool that you and your BHR were on Everest though! 

[pblythswood]

Thanks to everyone for the replies,

Just an update, after arriving at our first stop I drank in excess of another 3 litres of water that evening and just under another 2 in the morning, also the day had been very very tough, walking for just under 10 hours over half of which was hard uphill and we covered over a 1000ft vertical in that time.



 so took a judgement that as I had another 5 days hard slog uphill that it'd be better to come down rather than risk any permanent damage, whether that was the right decision given the feedback don't really know now, but my group could hear my hip from several yards away !!! So it was pretty bad.

Regards
Paul

[hernanu]

I think you made the right decision. It's always better to be conservative and live to squeak another day 

Getting up there is very cool. Hope you planted the hippy flag.

[Tin Soldier]

That's a pretty amazing story.  I've been away for awhile, getting side-tracked on another project, mercury cleanup in a town high in the Andes.  Hoping to go there in June.  It's at 12000 ft and I've been looking into the whole high altitude sickness deal and wondered about dehydration as it relateds to our hips.

I wonder if your body can only take in so much water as you climb?  You might be thinking you're hydrated enough but with all the paramaters against you in that type of environment, as Hern pointed out, maybe you just can't get enough water back into your tissues.  Maybe that's why you pretty much have a headache no matter what you do when climbing (without being acclimitized).  I think the hydration aspect may have something to do with the squeak.  Maybe there's more to it though becasue the blood goes through some chemical changes as one becomes acclimitized, pH changes and I bet there's a whole host of various parameters that change in the body when going up too quickly.

Cool topic.