Hip Surgery – Dick McDonald

            On a quiet Tuesday morning last November, Dick McDonald of Demopolis had major surgery at Bryan Whitfield Memorial Hospital. Within the next few hours after surgery, he was up, walking around his hospital room. On Thursday, he left the hospital, went home, and promptly donned his walking shoes for a mile-long walk.

            Over the course of the next week, the avid runner had worked up to walking two miles a day. Ok, sounds easy enough, no big deal, right?

            Not if you take into consideration the fact that the surgery he had was a total hip replacement which, had he had surgery anywhere else in the state, would have required a week’s stay in the hospital followed by weeks or months of recovery and physical therapy. Instead, McDonald opted to have his hip replaced via the anterior hip replacement approach used by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Lester Littell at Bryan Whitfield Memorial Hospital.

            “The anterior approach for total hip replacement provides definite advantages for patients,” explains Dr. Littell. In standard hip replacement surgery, an incision, often six to eight inches in length, is made behind the hip or along the side of it, and a metal artificial hip is implanted. In the new minimally invasive anterior approach, the surgeon accesses the hip through the front. The normal incision is four inches, but it may vary depending on the patient’s body size.

            This allows more direct access to the site and alleviates the necessity to cut muscle away from the bone, according to Dr. Littell. The gluteal muscles, the largest and most powerful muscles, are left entirely undisturbed, which means less pain for the patient, a shorter recovery time, and less chance of hip displacement after surgery.

             Littell became the first and only physician to offer this procedure in the state after BWWMH purchased a PROfx surgical table last year. This specially designed operating table features “boots” that hold patients’ legs in place and can be twisted using a wheel attached to the base of each foot. This allows patients to lie on their backs, and the legs can be gently twisted to access different angels of the hip.

            “We invested $130,000 in this surgical table to get started with the program,” said Mike Marshall, CEO/Administrator of the 99-bed facility. “We started offering this surgery in October and by the end of the 2004 calendar year, we had already paid for the table by both increasing our volume and by cutting the length of stay by more than half.”

            “This hospital is forward-thinking enough to offer this service to the community by investing in the technology to offer a different procedure,” Littell adds. “This is the only facility in Alabama where this can be done and I’ve already done several patients from Jackson and Hattiesburg, MS.”

            With about two dozen of these procedures under his belt since his first surgery last year, Dr. Littell is still proud of McDonald’s recovery. “Dick’s recovery period surprised me,” he said. “He took his walker home so that he’d have something to help him get out of the car that day and he never used it again after the second day.”

            For McDonald, he felt immediate relief from the constant pain he’d had since being diagnosed with osteoarthritis more than two years ago. “The pain was gone as soon as I woke up from surgery,” he said. “Of course, there was pain from the procedure itself, but it was nothing like what I’d been living with.

            “You condition yourself to work with whatever pain you’re living with and I had wanted to put off hip replacement as long as possible. There were times I could just barely move without my hip hurting,” he said. “I tried to tough it out but in retrospect, I’d recommend that people go ahead had have hip surgery if they need it. Don’t wait. And this procedure allowed me to get back into action so much quicker.”

            Five months after his surgery, McDonald can do anything he wants. “Before the surgery, I couldn’t drive my stick shift truck, now I have almost full flexibility. I can do yoga stretches and I’m working out again. I’ve finished a deck on the back of our house, planted fruit trees and I’m keeping my two acres cut. This has definitely been a good experience for me.”