I am the Canadian who was having to revise 1 hip with Dr. Pritchett. In the end, I had to get both revised...and the femoral unit was loose and had to be revised, too. Crazy,but at least I have managed to stay with HR and not go THR. I have been fighting this battle for a while and I was really getting depressed. My life was just going down the tubes, despite the fact that on the outside few people knew.
Pritchett did not know going in this past week that the left hip would need such an extensive revision. So what I have now are two Synovo Acetabuler cups, and for femoral I managed to keep the Conserve on the right, but the left was replaced with a curved stem HR unit, that resembles the Mitch Per. I will find out exactly what the unit is on the 19th.
What happened? Why the revisions?
There was poor Range of Motion in both hips, and in the OR with Dr. Antoniou it is possible I was not sized properly, as the impingement issue was a real problem for me. The day before this last surgery I met and talked with Pritchett, and we discussed this...meaning I asked him if he could fix it. He told me he didn't think he could, but he could clearly see on the x-Ray how the impingement was affecting the femur bone. This impingement also added a leverage issue on the stem. To make matters worse, when I get my nerve pain attacks I try all manner of contortions that might have affected the implant, and those attacks have been craziest right after surgery.
"Take it easy, just do the exercises they give you". I have read and heard this now a lot, but I have been so crazily dying to have my active life back I might have been pushing too hard, too early. Every one of these recoveries is different, too. This last one seems like the fastest so far: despite a 100% complete overhaul of both implants I am already walking around the house with no assistance of any kind. I had the surgery on Tuesday, and today is Saturday! I actually noticed last night I didn't need the cane anymore. Crazy! Compared to my spinal surgeries, I have found the hip surgeries a real challenge where rushing things may mean more pain and going through what I have had to endure.
Despite paying $50 grand US for this, I wish I had gone to Pritchett in the first place. He has an arsenal of devices and a ton of miles, whereas in Canada they have all but abandoned the HR in favour of THR. The hospital Antoniou works out of is bursting at the seams, and Antoniou himself is really hard to reach and discuss anything. He is undoubtedly a top-notch surgeon, but he is saddled by a bureaucracy that doesn't favour the patient.
Anyway, Pritchett was great post-op, and obviously excited and proud of his work. However, this is not normally done, and if he had known beforehand that the femoral unit was bad he would have advised me to go back to Canada and get a THR (those are his words, btw).